Through The Tunnel & Beyond Revised

>> NARRATOR:: It is inevitable, a fact, a certainty: all of us are born to die. But what then? From our earliest beginnings, human beings have yearned to know what lies beyond death. More than 2000 years ago, Plato wrote that all earthly wisdom is but a rehearsal for a great awakening, an awakening that takes place upon death. Every religion and culture share one commonality - belief there is life after death. Today the subject of life after death is a common topic of discussion among physicians and scientists around the world. Scientific proof is sought and modern techniques are being used to research a subject that was once taboo. It took one man to discover there was a common thread in near-death experiences. It was he who broke new ground by studying the cases of those who were diagnosed clinically dead and then returned to life. This man is Raymond Moody. He is a classically trained PhD in philosophy, with an MD in psychiatry. Doctor Moody's first book, Life after Life, paved the pathway for near-death studies. Today, Doctor Moody's findings have become part of the language of the academic, medical and spiritual communities. It was he who coined the phrases 'life after life', 'near-death experiences' and 'light at the end of the tunnel'. >> DR.MOODY:: I did not start life as a particularly religious person. As a matter of fact, what I like to say about my background is that we were not religious and called it Presbyterian. So my approach to life was trying to figure out things via the scientific method and that context, of course, I had always assumed that death is just an obliteration of consciousness; it's like the lights going off, only permanently. And when I started hearing about all of this stuff, about 'a life after death' my reaction essentially was, give me a break. I thought that this was people fooling themselves and engaging in wish fulfillment and that sort of thing. In 1965, when I was 21 years old, I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at the University of Virginia and one of my philosophy professors, John Marshall, told me about a psychiatry professor there at the university, Doctor George Ritchie, who had had a quite amazing experience when he had been pronounced dead some years before. And since, up to that point, I had always assumed that at that point where the doctor declares you dead, there's no more consciousness. I was highly intrigued that here was a person who was quite sane and reputable, very beloved in the community and so on, who had had quite a different experience; that when he was pronounced dead, in fact, had very vivid states of consciousness. But you know, when you hear one thing like that out of a void that's so contrary to what you have always assumed on instinct for the rest of your life, you just don't know what to make of it. In 1969, after I'd gotten my PhD in philosophy, I was teaching and one day one of my students came up after class and, quite unsolicited said, Doctor Moody, I wish we could talk more about life after death in this philosophy class. And I remember him kind of emphasizing that word philosophy, as though I was somehow amiss and not talking about what he regarded as an important issue. But at that time I thought that that was just an antique notion, you know, and I remember asking him well, why do you want to talk about that, as though that's something that a modern philosophical perspective would not be really interested in. And he said, because about a year ago, I was in a bad accident and my doctors said I died, and I had an experience that has totally changed my life and I haven't had anybody to talk about it with. Well, you know, obviously I wanted to hear this, so I invited him into my office and to my absolute astonishment - I remember to this day how surprised I was - he told me identically what I had heard from George Ritchie four years before. And the moment I heard that story, I realized that this was something that had to be fairly common, because it was obviously, you know, an impossible coincidence that I would have stumbled across the only two cases of this that existed, over a four year period without even attempting to find cases of it. So at that moment, as I said, I realized hey, this is something that is worth looking into and that there will be more of these. And I particularly wanted to find out why scholars hadn't written about this and why I, who had spent up to that time, my whole life studying the human mind, had not ever heard of this. And then when I went to medical school, of course, that was a great opportunity to go to the codes after the patients had had cardiac arrest that I would hear about, and I would go and sit with them and talk with them and patients would in fact telling me this same kind of story again and again, the same kinds of events that I had first heard from George Ritchie many years before. That was how I wrote Life after Life. There's a great deal of spiritual inspiration in talking with people who've returned from the verge of death and to see how their lives have been so positively transformed often by these experiences. George Ritchie once said to me, 'Raymond, this experience makes your humanity even more of a burden'. >> NARRATOR:: Up until this point, Raymond Moody's work had drawn him almost exclusively to those individuals who had experienced a close encounter with death, but now his focus shifted to a second group, those whom death had separated from a loved one; the bereaved and the grief-stricken. Once again his curiosity was triggered by an experience that many of them shared. >> DR.MOODY:: We have known for a long time in medicine that a high percentage of people who are bereaved, who have lost someone to death, will within a certain period of time of the death, have an experience which they regard as seeing and being in the presence of the departed loved one. As a matter of fact, there are several separate medical studies that have been conducted independently that suggest that as many as two thirds of widows will have the experience of seeing or hearing from their husbands after the husbands have died. But we know from clinical observation that this is true of other bereaved people as well - bereaved siblings, bereaved parents, bereaved children, bereaved friends of the deceased - and that this is a remarkably common human experience. The mere fact that as we know from the medical studies these experiences are remarkably common, means that we human beings are highly predisposed to experiences like that. Well then, why can't we at least try to conceptualize a way of bringing circumstances together in such a way as to increase the likelihood that a given individual will have that experience at a given time and place? >> NARRATOR:: In search of an answer to this tantalizing question, Doctor Moody returned once more to his studies of philosophy, in particular the writings of the ancient Greeks. He vaguely recalled an account by the Greek historian, Herodotus, about a technique for communicating with the dead. >> DR.MOODY:: I have read something in Herodotus about a place that the Greeks had where allegedly one would travel to see one's relatives and friends. I went to the archeological reports that I could find and I discovered that in fact this place had actually been located. In 1957, the site had been rediscovered by an archaeologist. I had a very interesting exchange with him over a period of a couple of days, discussing with him his original excavations and his work at this certainly phenomenal site. >> DR.DAKARIS:: Not for the deaths, all the men… everyone would make it to see on the surface of the water. >> DR.MOODY:: That's right, visions. Exactly, exactly. Doctor Dakaris, in his search for this site, surmised that in fact the oracle was in the northwest corner of Greece in Epirus. Homer talks about the oracle being located at a point where two rivers flow together to form the Acheron River and it was a pinnacle of rock. All Doctor Dakaris did was to trust Homer and to go to the location that he believed Homer was talking about, excavate it, and indeed did find this subterranean complex there exactly at the location where he surmised Homer had located it. The institution was subterranean. This was another factor in why it was so long undiscovered. Even in its heyday in antiquity it was entirely underground. In approximately 160 BC, the Romans burned the Oracle of the Dead and at this point this dropped out of Western civilization as we know it. Then subsequently, in about 350 AD the church banned it; they made it anathema for a Christian to believe that a spirit can be seen in a mirror. And so for that reason, we have had no continuing tradition of evocation of the deceased in Western civilization. Doctor Dakaris observed, even prior to his discovery of the oracle site in 1957, that it was a folk belief among the local inhabitants that the entrance to the other side was nearby, so it's astounding then that this tradition persisted in the folklore of the region for literally many centuries. Plato has been my favorite philosopher since 1962 and I've always loved the ancient Greek culture, so to me it was just a really overwhelming experience to be able to go there and to walk around some of these places that I had read about for the better part of my life, and to be able actually to go to this institution - the Necromanteion as it's called in the locality - and stand on those places that Herodotus wrote about and that I believe Homer described so beautifully, was absolutely thrilling. We're here at one of the most amazing places in the world, to me at least. This is the Oracle of the Dead at Epirus, where in ancient times, people would come to actually see and visit with the spirits of their departed loved ones. Until recent times, scholars have assumed that what was going on here was simple fraud, in the sense that we in the 20th Century West presumably know that such things that were described here by the ancient writers, can't be. But in light of recent developments and research that's been done now by many psychologists replicating the experience of seeing apparitions of the departed, we can now have a plausible explanation of what was going on in this rather amazing sanctuary. And now we come through this entrance way of enormous stones into a courtyard which is laid out to give the impression that one is in a cave or in an underground world, and has to imagine that in antiquity this was roofed over, so that we literally felt as though we were in the underworld. At this point the pilgrims would have been met by the psychagogues, the guides who lived here to conduct the pilgrims through the experience of visiting with their deceased. As we go in a little bit into the more functioning part of the oracle proper, we find immediately in front of us here, a wall. The right part of the wall was a medieval addition. The Byzantine Church built a chapel here in medieval times on the ruins of the ancient oracle. And now we are in the operative part of the oracle. A sharp right turn at the end of the corridor brings one into a maze with narrow passageways, sharp turns and it's good to remember that all of this was in pitch black. And then the visitor came to the last turn of the maze, passed through it into the apparition chamber proper, through these heavy doors. And as the apparition seeker came into this room, one can only imagine what was going through his or her mind, because this was the culmination of the journey. The pilgrim walked across, walked into the apparition area proper, and in here, the seeker underwent a culmination of his journey. In this room, there was big bronze cauldron. I believe it was probably highly polished and filled with water to make, in effect, a big mirror. The pilgrims would encircle it, gaze into the cauldron and there, in the reflective surface, initially see images which, in many cases no doubt, would then appear to emerge from the reflective surface, come out actually into the physical environment, full color, full size, three dimensional. And no doubt in many of the cases, talking, so that the seeker would experience the living presence of the person who had died. I'm quite convinced from my own experiments in the United States that after the seeker would leave this room, he was totally a different person, from then on, for the rest of his life, dramatically changed by what happened in here. And finally, after this experience in the apparition hall, the pilgrims were led here into this chamber, which was a purification room, where they were purified by bathing in sulfur, which was the ancient way of purifying anyone who had been in contact with the dead. Then, after the sulfur bath, they were led out of here, down the hill to the river - the river Acheron - where they received a ritual bath. Each time I come back here, I feel a little more confident that in fact now we do know what was going on here, at least in outline, and that we can now demonstrate psychologically that it is in fact quite possible to have visitations with the deceased, exactly as the ancients believed and contrary to the opinion of two millennia now of scholars. I often reflect that if history had been a little bit different, if we had taken up the great tradition of evoking apparitions just as we did the tradition of democracy and the notion of history, our notion of science, so many of the institutions that we value in the West, we might have had a very, very different culture indeed. >> NARRATOR:: But the practice of evoking apparitions through clear depth gazing did not vanish entirely. Rather it went underground. It became a favored tool of mystics and metaphysical scholars. The most famous of them was a 16th century Frenchman known as Nostradamus. He used a crystal ball to assist him in predictions. Nostradamus had a contemporary in England whose name was Doctor John Dee. >> DR.MOODY:: He was an inveterate scholar and by the time that he was nineteen years old, he was already an instructor in Greek at Cambridge University. He became an expert in mathematics; he wrote one of the standard textbooks of mathematics of the Elizabethan age, he helped reintroduce Euclid to Europe by writing a very good preface. He was an expert in navigational equipment and techniques and he invented some of the navigational apparatus which made the great voyages of discovery possible. At some point in his career he came across an Aztec obsidian divination mirror. You know, obsidian is that black, glassy volcanic rock such as is found in Mexico and when the Spaniards went to the New World, they brought one of these objects back for study. And the Aztec priests would gaze into this and try to figure out what was going to happen in the future. As John Dee experimented with this object, he was surprised to see that he was able to have visions. He describes how spirits would appear at first in the mirror and then come out of the mirror into the room, that would carry on audible conversations. >> NARRATOR:: John Dee may have also applied obsidian stone gazing to more political ends. He's reputed to have been one of Queen Elizabeth's spies who kept her informed of the activities of her arch enemy, Spain. It is known that the code he used to sign his messages to Her Royal Majesty, was 007. Clear depth or mirror gazing also persisted in a more pervasive, but less threatening form, through popular culture. It features prominently in fairytales and legends. In the Grimm Brothers' Snow White, the wicked queen continually turns to her 'mirror, mirror on the wall'. The original story of Aladdin tells us the genie appeared not from the lamp, but reflected in it. Nineteenth century writer Lewis Carroll gave us the unforgettable Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Early 20th century Halloween cards frequently show mirrors reflecting ghosts, goblins and straw-haired sweethearts, and the advertisers of the era knew a good thing when they saw it. They offered a future filled with a brand new sewing machine. And the trend continues right up to the present. In the Disney blockbuster The Lion King, a young Simba gazes into a pool and hears words of assurance from his dead father. But while myths and the movies can rely on magic, Raymond Moody needed something more concrete. He was searching now for a practical way to encourage apparitional experiences and he turned once more to the Greek oracles of the dead. >> DR.MOODY:: It's quite surprising but nonetheless true, that there were lots of oracles of the dead in antiquity and apparently they operated in different ways - they had different methods. And the ones in which the apparition of the departed was actually made to appear and the visitors would actually see the apparition of the departed, were called psychomanteums. And so I created my own psychomanteum. The way I did it was that I mounted a wall mirror in an upstairs room in my research facility, mounted it so that the bottom edge of the mirror was about 32 inches off the floor, surrounded the entire area of the mirror with a black velvet curtain to exclude reflections. Put a very comfortable easy chair right in front of the mirror and took the legs of the chair off so that it sits low down to the floor and so that the person sitting in the chair and looking up into the mirror does not see his or her own reflection. Behind the chair there is a dim light-bulb mounted so that it casts a diffuse illumination up over the back of the chair. And when all the lights are turned out and all the illumination is coming from this light bulb behind the chair; that provides a really spectacular optical clear depth. We asked each subject to choose some one person who's died that they want to see again, and I get them to choose mementos, things that the deceased person owned which they very poignantly associate with the life of that person. And then they come out to my facility and typically we take a walk in the country and during that time I really explore with them on a very deep level, why do you want to do this? What's your motivation for doing this and so on? We have a very extended encounter during which I really get down with these people and get them to tell me all about the relationship that they had had with the departed person. I want to know everything about this person, like what kind of person was this, what was their personality like, what did they look like, what are your good memories, what are your not-so-good memories of this person? How did they die? How did you react to the death; what do you miss most about them? Really, a very intense exploration of the relationship that they had had with the deceased person. Then I get them to show me the mementos that they have brought and I get them to tell me the significance of each one of these mementos. When they've reached this point of almost like a saturation of talking about the deceased individual, we lead them into the apparition chamber proper. I put them in there, let them sit in the chair and tell them that they're to just relax in there and gaze far, far away into the mirror and sit there and sort of review some of the things that we've talked about; to sit there expectantly, waiting in effect for the apparition of the departed person to appear, which - and not surprisingly - a percentage of cases it actually does. Our subjects will report typically at first seeing a cloud or a mist, like the mirror fogs over as it were, and then this mist dissipates and then the apparition of the departed person may appear, at first often in the distance in the mirror. And then the apparition of the departed person seems to emerge from the mirrored surface and come out right in front of the subject. They often see it full color, full size, three dimensions, apparently quite solid, sitting right across from them. SPEAKER 2: They were coming from the mirror to being in the room or past me. I would say within about one to two seconds it would take to do each one, so it was fairly rapid, this kind of a pacing. SPEAKER 3: You know, Diane brought me in and she told me, you know, what to expect and said I'll be back to get you in about half an hour, forty five minutes. And when she came and opened the door, it seemed like she had just walked out, like it was only a few minutes. It really didn't seem like a long time at all. SPEAKER 2: I sat for forty straight minutes and watched one figure, full color, three dimensional to a point, but not lifelike in the sense that I couldn't ever have a sense of seeing through it; it was… had that sense of eeriness to that, but not vague; it wasn't the ghostly kind of figure that you normally see portrayed. They were very visible and very clear. SPEAKER 4: I was gazing into the mirror and totally relaxed, you know, and at first I didn't really see anything. And… I was getting images of light. I didn't see any face… I couldn't tell any face to anything, but what I saw first… I guess it was like a goldish-green type of light and it was like just floating. >> DR.MOODY:: A number of our subjects also report the experience of going into the mirror themselves, that they feel at a certain point that they go, just like Alice did in Through the Looking Glass, and in effect into the mirror. And it's in this unusual alternate dimension that they meet up with their departed relatives, who seem to be there again, right in front of them, very vividly and communicating. SPEAKER 3: When I first sat in there for a while, I was wondering if anything was going to come up. I never got the real clouds or anything like that, I just started to see pieces of images. I'm probably not going to remember any order, because it started out very slow at first and as things progressed and started coming up more and more and my eyes did continue to tear, like I said to you. That happened before, but it was funny, with that chair sitting back like this, I could just let it run down and I was fine. I saw Laura - FEMALE: It's like the night… all of a sudden I started to cry, because I wanted it so bad, but I didn't know why I was crying, you know, and then I calmed down again and I said, well, let me close my eyes again. And I did and that was it; it wasn't… you know, I thought I might have smelled something, but then I couldn't distinguish what it really was. It wasn't anything familiar. >> DR.MOODY:: Before I ever even conducted a single person through this procedure, I went and asked a very dear friend of mine, Doctor William Roe, who has studied spontaneous apparitions of the departed for over forty years, whether to his knowledge there had ever been a single case in which harm had come to anyone from an apparitional encounter. And Bill said to me, absolutely not, but that not only that, typically these experiences are very beneficial, because they enable people to smooth over the rough edges in a relationship and to perhaps get their grief resolved a bit so that they can go on with their lives. Nonetheless, I do caution people, don't do this alone; this can be very, very powerful material. SPEAKER 2: I've often been asked, was I scared, and certainly fear came up on occasion as I saw things like wolves and things coming out of the mirror. Who knows what was going to come out of the mirror and could it possibly hurt me? Those fears came and went, because of my belief system. >> DR.MOODY:: There's no question in the minds of subjects who go through this, that they are in a waking state of awareness at the time, and that the experience lacks that kind of surrealistic flavor that we have in dreams. The perception seems absolutely real, that they have a sense of the presence of the person, that they seem palpably there. 15% of our subjects report being hugged or touched and actually having tactile experience of the event and the whole thing seems incredibly real. One has the impression in going through it that it is a real contact and a real experience of seeing a departed loved one. SPEAKER 4: What did it for me was, I got a pat on the top of the head and I turned around to see… because I had stretched back a little bit and I got like a pat and I turned around and I thought maybe I hit the ceiling or something, because the ceiling slopes. But I put my hand up, I couldn't even reach it with my hand and so… well, that was real, you know, I felt it. Now I don't know if that's my son's way of… he likes to kid around, he knows I like my hair in proper place; maybe… I don't know, but I definitely did feel something. SPEAKER 3: I had the definite sensation that somebody came in from behind the mirror, around to my left side and was just kind of being there. And I wasn't quite sure who it was or if it was my grandmother or not, but a little while after that I heard cat meow, and she really loved cats, so I felt that, you know, that was the connection, that she had been there. It was intuitive; I was asking the question internally and I don't really know how I got the answer, it just kind of jelled mentally for me. That's the thing about the psychomanteum is that there's a lot of different ways to receive information. A lot of people experience information visually; I've had oral or hearing-type information; I've smelled different smells or scents, as well as just intuitively received information. It can be a very visionary experience. >> DR.MOODY:: Now, I am the first to add, and I immediately want to go on to add here that the fact that people report it is real, does not mean in a scientific context that it was real. But the importance of the fact that it's experienced as a real event from the scientific perspective is that this means that we have in fact recreated the experience of seeing apparitions, that this gives us a good theoretical model, as it were, for the experience of seeing apparitions, because that's exactly what people who see apparitions of departed loved ones spontaneously will tell us that they interpret it to be a real encounter, a real event. SPEAKER 2: I'm still somewhat skeptical. I don't know what it is; I have no doubt there's something going on, I have no doubt that this is energy from someplace else. It may someday turn out… come to a realization that it's some sort of energy that comes not from the plane where people are deceased and not here, or from some other plane, but without a doubt, it does not come from the what we think of as being reality. I know for a fact that the experiences I've had, particularly my parade of images, was not fake, it was not… it was extremely real. There's no way that could have happened, there's no way that could have been faked. I was truly taken back; this was the experience that I was looking for, to tell me this phenomenon was like no other that I'd ever had, and I needed that, although my experiences on most people's point of view would have… in meditation, et cetera, would have been pretty profound, it wasn't profound to me, because I'd had them so many times. This was the experience that I'd been looking for to say no, no, no, something's different here; this is not your normal, everyday experience, this is exceptional. So I was just… to use a very clinical word, blown away. I was, as I said, I was looking around in the room, looking at these figures as they hovered over me and passed by me and saying, I don't believe this is happening; this is amazing. So to say the least, I was pretty taken back and it was very happy, very joyful, relaxing… SPEAKER 3: It does calm you; it does have… I was very nervous going in, you knew that, you know; I didn't know what to expect. And it does kind of calm you. And I can't get over that I was in there for that long… I really can't get past that. It just seemed like five minutes, you know… like I had this whole long time to wait, and it was over, you know. >> CHERYL MOODY:: He has such an inner calm and peace about him, I wonder sometimes, does he know something the rest of us don't know? Does he have some connection we don't know about? But when we did get married, we even said in our wedding vows that this was it, to the tunnel and beyond. You know, my background was in broadcasting and I was in public affairs and I knew lots of people who paid a lot of lip service to helping others, and that's mostly what I heard about all day long, every day. And now I'm actually with somebody whose life is dedicated to truly helping other people through what appears to be some of the most difficult times of their lives, when they've lost loved ones or they're dealing with horrendous issues of grief. When you're grieving, you don't realize - and nobody can really tell you - that grief is a process, because you feel like it's a state of being: this is the way I'm always going to feel and I can't do this, you know, it's too hard. And Raymond is able, through his work and his research, to alleviate that for so many people. I get tears in my eyes all the time when we're at conferences, because people in all languages, all over the world, will come up to him and say, Doctor Moody, thank-you so much; your book saved my life. We have found out, since the book was published, that there are people all over the world who have been doing this clear depth or mirror gazing for many, many, many years, just for creativity purposes, or reunion purposes, and it's been interesting to see how many people knew about this; this was not exactly a secret. But here's Raymond again, putting it out there. Could we have everybody's attention just for a minute? We don't want to be too formal. We just want to welcome you all. >> DR.MOODY:: Yes, we just want to say welcome, welcome, welcome. We want to offer you whatever knowledge we have about this procedure and spend the - >> CHERYL MOODY:: When Raymond's book was published in France, we had the opportunity to be over there at the time, and it's incredible how widely accepted in France and in Spain and in other countries Raymond's work is. People are in… the French in particular, who were really very… almost snobbish about everything having to be proven and being scientific, they're so accepting of Raymond and his work. He spoke recently at the Sorbonne and it wasn't just standing room only, I mean, it was literally the kind of thing where you say people were swinging from the rafters or something; there were so many people there and had so many interesting questions. But they are very accepting of the work that he's doing, and whereas we might say, oh yeah, mm-hmm, right, prove it. You're telling me people are seeing departed loved ones in the mirror; I'm finding that in Spain and France and other parts of Europe, they're not saying prove it, they're saying tell me more. He's talked to over 3,000 people who've had this experience; people want to talk about it in the workshops and I'm just awed by the fact that he still has the kind of interest and delight that he has in listening to other folks' stories and hearing all about these experiences. We hear from many, many, many doctors - anesthesiologists, pediatricians, cardiologists - folks who are dealing with life and death every day, and a number of times I have heard them say to Raymond, you know, I wasn't buying this until such and such. A doctor from my hometown, who is my grandmother's physician and was my grandfather's many years ago, this physician, said to me, oh, I'm glad that Raymond's book is out, because now I have somewhere to refer people to his new work, because you know, for many years I've heard from widows and widowers how they're talking to their lost loved ones, and asking me did I think it was okay, or was it normal? And he said, I'm relieved now to have a place to send them for more information. And I think it's just so common and there's so much common experience, that when people have an opportunity to meet Raymond and to talk to him, usually they have a story to tell. >> DR.MOODY:: I wrote Reunions because I wanted to get this information out. I think that, whatever one makes of these findings about the apparitions seen in the psychomanteum, it's important work. And for me, of course, the main response I want to see happen is my colleagues in psychology and so on, I want to see them reproducing this phenomenon and seeing what they make of it. And that's already happened. To me it's such an intriguing idea that in the ancient world, there was an institution for a thousand years where you could go and there you could have the experience of seeing and visiting with and talking with departed relatives. And I wouldn't be too surprised if, over the next few years, this institution reappears in our modern world. And I'm so looking forward to seeing that as it develops, to see how people respond to this; to see how our society integrates this. My hope for it is that it will turn out to be something very therapeutic and that it will help people who are undergoing prolonged grief, who just can't let go of a loved one lost to death, and for that reason are miserable themselves. And one of the most common things that you hear people say at that time is, if I only had five more minutes. What we can do now, without a doubt, is that we can give people that five more minutes. If we can help people like this turn themselves around and open up to hope and to a new life, then I think all of this will be justified.