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April 10, 2005 - Art Bell
02:54:46
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Raymond Moody - NDEs and Dying
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Time Text
So, I'm going to play a little bit of the music.
So, I'm going to play a little bit of the music.
Music playing.
From the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon,
wherever you may be in the world's time zones.
Oh Oh, so many of them.
Every single one of them covered like a blanket by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
Great to be here.
Escorting you through the weekend.
Safely through the weekend, I hope.
Speaking of safely, or not-so-safe, uh, Discovery Channel running Super Volcano.
And I was watching that right up until airtime, but I've got the DVR running on it, so I will capture the entire thing and see it all.
But basically, a pretty scary flick, to be sure.
It's about Yellowstone.
The caldera going poom!
And the entire, including mine down here, I think.
No, I didn't get that far in the show, but I imagine we're toast, too, here in the high desert.
Speaking of big events, just an incredible late snowstorm in Colorado.
A very good friend of mine, Tim, is a truck driver and they've got all the roads closed he was in the New Mexico area near Colorado near the Colorado border and those roads are closed so he's in a motel for the night 18-wheeler getting snow piled on top of it outside going nowhere and that's where a lot of people are stuck and going nowhere on those highways so if you're out there and one of them stay warm and stay put you probably have no choice
Turning to what world news there is, the lead story, Cardinals prepare to meet to plan conclave.
Here it comes.
Catholics' thoughts turn to who might replace their beloved Pope as the Cardinals, silenced by an unprecedented pledge not to reveal their thinking, Prepared to meet again Monday to plan next week's conclave to select a new leader, one of the Cardinals, who celebrated masses around Rome on Sunday, gently requested of the faithful, all of you out there, to please stop speculating on possible successors to Pope John Paul II.
So, in other words, stop the rumors!
They'll figure it out.
But what a process.
Thousands of Israeli police mobilized at Jerusalem's most sensitive holy site Sunday, but confronted only a handful of Jewish extremists intent on scuttling a Gaza pullout by trying to tie up security forces.
In Gaza, militants fired dozens of mortar shells after Israeli forces killed three teenagers.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, speaking on a plane taking him to Monday's meeting with President Bush
said the mortar fire is quote a flagrant violation
of the understandings and quote reached a February truce summit with
Palestinian leader Abbas. Private
GOP tensions over Tom DeLay's ethics controversy have spilled into the public today as a Senate
leader called on DeLay to explain his actions
When a House Republican demanded the majority leader's resignation.
A Representative Chris Shays, Republican from Connecticut, told the Associated Press in an interview, calling for delay to step down as a majority leader.
So, I guess it's getting very serious.
Hundreds of travelers, as I mentioned, stranded at the Denver airport and along highway Sundays as a blizzard blew across eastern Colorado with wet, Heavy snow, the temperature right now in Denver probably about 28 degrees or so, and that makes for the very wet kind of heavy snow that they're getting.
Tiger Woods!
Ah, he's back, folks.
He's the Masters champion yet again, turning back a surprising challenge Sunday with a shot of sheer magic and a birdie putt to win a playoff that he never expected.
So, congratulations, Tiger!
Women at the National Institutes of Health faced sexual intimidation and repeated disregard of their concerns for the welfare of patients in AIDS experiments, according to testimony by two senior female officers and documents gathered by other investigators.
One long-time medical officer at the government's premier medical research agency alleges that the harassment and disregard Well, that's very worrisome.
You might or might not have heard about it.
If not, you will in a moment.
afraid to hold up experiments even if they see a safety problem.
In a moment I've got some news, well that's very worrisome, you might or might not have
heard about it, if not you will in a moment.
Scary stuff.
You might not have heard about this on the regular evening news.
I'm really not sure, but this really, really, really bears your careful watching, all of ours.
Headline is, Panic in Angola as Killer Virus Spreads.
The killer virus is Marburg.
Most of you have heard, I think, of Ebola.
Marburg is a close and extremely deadly relative of Ebola.
Yeah, well, just listen to the stories.
Panic spread through Angola's capital yesterday after the worst recorded outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus, an Ebola-like condition that kills with massive internal bleeding, claimed its 150th life.
Many in Luanda, a city of 3.8 million, withdrew their children from schools, shops, ran low on supplies of bleach, Which millions wanted to disinfect the water supply, state radio broadcast an emergency message every single ten minutes saying, alert Marburg, don't touch any corpse.
Inform the health authorities about any suspicious illness or death due to bleeding.
Angola's health ministry said that 163 cases of Marburg have been recorded thus far.
All are believed to have originated in the province of Weegee, I guess it is.
U.I.G.E.
about a hundred and eighty miles northeast of Luanda on the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Four people have died in the capital.
All of them thought to have traveled from that city.
An Italian doctor working in a hospital there is among the dead.
At least three quarters of the victims Our children under the age of 15, we've now started to deploy teams in the problem areas.
So the World Health Organization, we can get a real sense of the depth and width of the problem.
It's important to realize that Marburg is very new for us.
It is serious since we don't know much about it.
And then I picked up on a commentary Published in something called or on a website called Recombinetics.com and it's this is very worrisome Marburg airborne transmission in Angola listen carefully and I can't of course guarantee is not one of the major news services so I'm just gonna read it to you be your own judge says medical workers warn visitors
Not to shake hands with anyone and not to stand directly in front of residents when talking to them for fear that a cough, a cough, could release an infectious spray of spittle.
Silo Margarita is one of the few nurses still working at the 500-bed regional hospital here, a sprawling collection of well-kept one-story concrete buildings that appeared Almost deserted on Saturday afternoon, wearing a surgical mask and plastic wrapped on her boots, she continued to care for 12 patients, despite the fact, she said, that as many as 15 of the hospital's nurses and two doctors have died from Marburg.
The two nurses died only last Thursday, she said.
The deteriorating situation there is raising the obvious question, is Marburg transmitting through the air in Angola?
Although there have always been warnings about transmission via contact with bodily fluids and concern about coughing, raising questions about By the ease of airborne transmission, initially most of the Marburg cases were children under the age of one, suggesting transmission via contaminated needles during childhood vaccinations.
However, about a month ago, the first health care worker died, and as noted above, the number is now 17.
Though protective gear was in short supply initially, the deaths of health care workers are still being recorded.
The total number of Marburg cases alive is relatively small.
When the WHO first announced the sequence results on March 23rd, they sequenced the virus.
There were only 7 Marburg patients alive.
Get this, 95 patients out of 102, so far, have died.
The number diagnosed has risen to 213.
The number still alive has grown to 30.
The increase in patients alive simply reflects the fact that newly diagnosed patients are being tallied quicker than older existing cases are dying, as noted above.
There are only 12 patients in the main hospital at the epicenter of the outbreak.
The ability of such a small number of patients to infect so many health care workers, especially,
one might add, after infection control efforts have been increased, does raise the possibility
that airborne transmission is fairly efficient.
The current outbreak in Angola has a case fatality rate at or near 100 percent higher
than any other prior outbreak of Marburg or Ebola.
It has now begun transmitting in Rwanda and will easily eclipse the old record of 280
dead set for Ebola, you'll recall, in 1967.
So, this is really one of those things that the world has got to keep its eyes centered directly on.
Should there actually prove to be airborne Marburg with up near, what, a 100% fatality rate, actually, looks like?
That could go whizzing around the world very quickly indeed, and I'm sure and I would hope they would be taking appropriate steps to isolate it.
And the mind, mine anyway, always wanders back to some motion pictures, you'll recall, that were made about outbreaks in the U.S.
and the cleansing of the area that ultimately was ordered by the political... You know, I think I can see That such a horrible decision could be made.
I mean, there could be a medical absolute necessity to simply sterilize the area where such an outbreak occurred if it began to be airborne.
I mean, that's literally all you could do and probably the only way that it could be stopped.
So, you know, we've got to keep our eye on this kind of thing.
The following I think you will find very, very educational.
This comes from a listener of mine down in Australia.
A police officer, in fact.
Ed Chanel, I'll give his name.
A police officer in Australia.
Hi Art.
Thought perhaps you all would like to see the real figures from down under.
It has now been twelve months since the gun owners in Australia were forced under a new law to surrender It turned out to be a total of 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own government.
A program costing Australian taxpayers, he adds, 500 million dollars.
And the results from taking all of these guns are now in.
You ready?
Of course, as you know, crime would be down now substantially.
They've taken away the guns from people.
More than well over half a million of them and destroyed them, so let's see what's going on in Australia now.
It's been a year.
Australia-wide, homicides, whoops, are up 3.2%.
Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6%.
Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6%.
Australia-wide, armed robberies, oh my god, they're up 44%.
Now you would think with all the guns gone, they'd be down!
But they're up!
44%.
In fact, in the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300%!
Oh my gosh.
Then it says, note, while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not!
And the criminals still have their guns!
While figures show over the previous 25 years there was a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months since criminals have guaranteed their preys unarmed.
There also has been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly.
Australian politicians are just at a loss to explain how public safety seems to have decreased after such a monumental effort and expense.
I doubt you're going to see this on the American Evening News or hear your governor or members of the State Assembly disseminating this information.
But the Australian experience would seem to prove it.
Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property, and yes, gun control laws affect only the law-abiding citizens.
Take note, Americans, before it's too late.
And I think that's a very well-advised little missive from Australia.
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
A year ago, they expended all of this money, they collected zillions of guns from law-abiding citizens in Australia, and what is their payment?
Much more crime.
Much less safe.
Now I live out in an area here, you know, kind of in the sticks.
And here you're allowed, if you're clean and they do an FBI check, to carry a gun.
And I must tell you, it makes for a very much more polite society.
And I think a safer society.
It's just common sense.
Think about it.
If you were a burglar, or worse, and you were approaching a residence, wouldn't, uh, wouldn't you have much more reason to pause if you were, for example, approaching a residence here near where I live, where virtually everybody has a gun?
You're damn right you would be.
Or, um, perhaps, uh, here where I live, where one might, uh, general expectation might be ten or fifteen or even twenty minutes before the police could arrive.
Should something happen about the only thing the police are going to be able to do, if it, you know, was somebody with bad intent, is they'll be able to draw a chalk line around your body, and that's where you were right there on that chalk line.
But if you have a gun to defend yourself, well, once again, from the mind of the person preparing to do the dastardly deed, they've got to imagine you might have a gun.
But if you're in Australia, and you're a criminal, and you're confident that all of those nasty deterrent things have been collected, and the worst you're going to face is somebody with a frying pan in their hand, well, I guess the numbers don't lie, do they?
So before we approve any measure to collect up all the guns at some great taxpayer expense and have them melted down, Perhaps we should all reflect on what happened in Australia.
What do you think?
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Well, you would have been, sorry.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi there, how are you?
I'm quite well, thank you.
Great.
I just wanted to ask about Dane's last night, if we could.
What would you ask about him?
Well, he mentioned that some of the little elements that he saw in the future could be changed.
He spoke of Yes, smaller, smaller things.
Maybe something, for example, at a personal level for you.
I mean, if you saw you were going to get hit by a truck, you just wouldn't go there, you wouldn't get hit.
Something else would happen.
The larger things, out of control, he said.
Okay, now as far as the collective goes, you know, like moving, space can move mountains.
Don't you think we could sort of delay or maybe alter some of the big stuff as well?
Well, I don't rule it out.
As you know, I experimented with and believe very strongly in this mass consciousness business.
But I also temper that, as I think you know, with caution.
You know, the old expression of not fooling around with Mother Nature, it's probably good advice.
I mean, you know, if you're doing something on that scale, then if you did have an unintended consequence, oh my God, it would be massively severe over a very wide area.
Sir, I'd like to ask you, I'm from a military family, I'd like to ask you about Semper Fi.
If you're swearing an oath to the Constitution or just to the President's administration, how does that work for you guys?
What do you mean, you guys?
Well, the military, uh, Marines, you can, you know... Semper Fi is, of course, a Marine expression, as you... Yeah, but it's regarding the oath or something along the... in, in, in... I'm not clear on what you're asking.
Well, you know, you gotta, you gotta sign away your constitutional rights to fight to protect the Constitution, and then everybody's letting the Constitution be eroded anyway.
It's not... Well, that's a very broad political comment.
I mean, yeah, it is, uh, of course, uh, the Constitution is being eroded.
You know, in the broader sense, as we fight terrorism, the natural outcome of terrorism is going to be an erosion of personal rights.
To fight it, we've got to search where we did not previously search.
To fight it, we've got to be able to come up with all kinds of new technology, face recognition programs, that sort of thing.
There's got to be tighter controls at the border.
And those things that you consider to be your right of privacy are certainly becoming eroded as we fight terrorism.
Just no question about it.
But I don't see any contradiction with regard to somebody taking an oath to, you know, join one of the U.S.
armed services and protect the Constitution.
Maybe in the very broadest sense.
But in the meantime, believe me, a soldier still follows orders.
When you're in the military, that's what you do.
You follow orders, and you let policy be decided in Washington.
That's just how it works.
Good morning.
I'm going to start with the first one.
Good morning.
Once upon a time Once when you were mine I remember your smiles reflected in your eyes I wonder where you are I wonder if you think about me Once upon a time To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
at 800-825-5033. From west of the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
International Callers International College.
They're a little different over the weekend, so you might make note of them.
We'll be in open lines for the next half hour.
and i would go for a hundred eight nine three zero nine zero three
from coast to coast and worldwide on the internet
this is close to close to him with our spells those are the numbers there are
little different uh... over the weekend so you might make note of them will be
an open lines for the next half hour top of the hour though comes
actually the world's biggest expert
the world's foremost expert on the whole phenomena of near-death experiences
the honorable reymond dr raymond
I think I sort of threw that in.
Very, very great guy, Dr. Moody, and he essentially began all of this in the modern era.
He's quite a guy, and if you've been curious about near-death, He's the man.
Coming up in less than half an hour.
And so into open line scan at the top of the hour comes Dr.
Raymond Moody.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air, hello.
Hello?
Hello?
Yes, hi.
You're on the air.
Oh, how you doing, Art?
I'm okay, sir.
Ah, you on the air?
I died once.
You died?
A long time ago.
You died once a long time ago.
Yeah, back in 82.
I was in a bad car wreck.
I got busted up real bad and wound up spending about six weeks in a coma and my body healed and coming out of the coma I went into shock and everything shut down.
Yeah, six weeks in a coma, shock, everything shuts down, I assume your heart quit beating, that sort of thing.
Yes, sir.
Do you have any recollection, how much do you remember of that time?
Actually, I'm not sure if it was a dream or a memory or what happened, but if it was, it was not too bad.
Because I didn't ever see him working on me or anything like you hear most of the other people do.
Yes.
I kind of woke up, like, in a park.
And it was a park I grew up in.
The only thing was, everybody that was there was somebody who had died before me.
Well, that's a pretty big hint.
And, uh, well, the weird part was, the first person who met me was my grandfather.
When I saw him, he looked like he did the last time I saw him.
But as time went by, everybody changed, and we all just kind of became the same.
Like, we were all, you know, about the same age, and everything was just really good.
I mean, it's one of them things that I just don't belong there.
So, in other words, when you first got there, for example, you met your grandfather, who had passed, and he looked at first as you remembered him, but then changed until eventually everybody else, everybody still recognizable, was about the same age.
Yeah, you know who everybody was, you just, they, everybody was the same though.
That's pretty interesting.
All right, thank you very, very much.
I was speaking with a friend of mine on Ham Radio, Ben.
He's a doctor.
He's a physician, now retired.
I think mostly retired.
I think he still does some, you know, I don't know what he does.
I think surgery.
Anyway, he knew that Dr. Moody was coming on tonight, and he said, it is very interesting, you know, we encounter things like that.
He told me he's encountered People who have had these NDEs like the man we just talked to.
And he's not so sure about it.
He said, you know, there are explanations that could end up making everybody telling the truth.
In other words, there are physical explanations that doctors give for what might be causing this.
But then again, there's what the people who have gone through it say.
Ben said, well, my friend the doctor, you know, there could be explanations that would make both parties happy, the doctor and the people who have gone through these experiences.
Anyway, that's what we're going to be talking about tonight.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
I'm on?
Yes.
Hello, this is Andrew.
I was just commenting about the guns.
Oh, the guns.
Yes.
I think it's very foolish of them to take them away from the public.
What if you're in an area like, okay, well, I live in Memphis, and Memphis is an extremely crime-involved city for one of its size.
And everywhere you look, there's crime in everything.
So what happens if, say, you're in your house by yourself, and somebody kicks in the door?
And if you don't have a gun, what are you going to do?
Well, right.
Duh.
In other words, Don't take guns away from the people that... Look, the statistics show it again and again and again and again that crimes are not committed ever by people who have, for example, carry permits.
These are people that have been checked out by the local police and the FBI and the authorities and they're given permits to carry weapons.
These people are not committing crimes.
The ones that are doing it are the criminals.
And they have the guns, and they're not going to turn them in!
So... This is like Gun 101.
I guess mine is the mentality of most Americans.
We believe very strongly, and I think this is evidence from Australia.
You know, how many times can you underscore something?
This one just nails it right to the wall.
What's for the Rockies?
You're on the air.
Hi.
Hi Art, this is Blair in Sedona, Arizona.
Hello.
Would you remind folks of your 2001 interview with Pam Reynolds about her experience when she was completely brain-dead?
Remarkable stuff.
Yes, I've had... Actually, sir, the one that hit me between the eyes was Sarah.
Sarah is one I will never Ever, ever, ever forget.
I don't know what hit me so hard about Sarah, and I don't know whether you ever heard that one.
I heard that one, too.
Yeah, that was the best, I thought.
Pam Reynolds, very good.
Sarah, right through the roof.
And so it goes to the point I wanted to make about electronic voice phenomena and what Ed Dames talked about as residual energy being a prime motivator.
Well, how about this spiritualism that the author of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, followed in the 19th century, whereby the spiritualists don't worship spirits, but they seek to contact those who cross the border dividing, you know, the material world from the spiritual.
And that they say that God is real, but defined in different ways depending upon the individual's level of spiritual development.
In other words, the phrase, the God of your understanding, is often used to talk about divinity.
So doesn't that sort of bring to mind that maybe not all trans-channelers are fraudulent and you just have to sort of judge by their fruits you shall know them?
I certainly agree with that.
They're not all fraudulent, though I think there are a lot of frauds out there.
I've always been highly suspicious of channeling just because it, uh... Oh, I don't know.
It's just so easy.
I mean, anybody with a little bit of drama could do it.
Shift the voice!
Begin to become somebody else from long ago with the story of the old.
And the way it was when you were starved.
Starved through the heart by a sword.
Right?
So, you can do that.
I think anybody almost could do it.
Some more convincingly than others.
However, I think there are real channelers, real psychics, Separating the wheat from the chaff, not so easy.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello.
Turn your radio off, please.
That's number one.
Now you may speak.
All right.
I was wondering if I'd ever heard of the Prometheus and Bob tapes.
Hmm.
Well, first of all, this is art.
Oh, art?
Uh, no.
Explain what you're talking about.
Oh, Prometheus and Bob tapes are 900,000-year-old tapes.
Made by an alien.
Trying to educate a caveman.
No, I wasn't around for that.
They're all cartoons.
Oh.
Something you might enjoy.
Has a very doll-witty overture to it.
Alright, well, you know my email.
Artbell at AOL.com or Artbell at Minespring.com.
Be sure and send them right along.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi, uh, hi there, Art.
I'm doing okay, sir.
I think what people mostly forget about the Second Amendment is it was instated to help us, you know, just in case the government got out of control, as our way of fighting back.
That's one of the reasons, yes.
Right.
It makes everybody a little uneasy, as they should be.
And that means not just criminals, but our government, too.
That's what the Second Amendment is all about.
It should make those who wish to do evil Uncomfortable, because most well-intentioned good citizens are armed.
Something anybody of evil intent would have to keep in mind before committing it.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
I got an analogy for your buddy who is a medicinal surgeon guy that uses the ham radio.
The brain is simply a computer.
And it transceives and receives, much like a ham radio with video.
Well, nobody's proven that yet.
Well, take some DMT.
Take some DMT.
Take some DMT.
That's all I gotta say, man.
You guys have a good night.
Alright, see you later.
Take some DMT.
Well, that doesn't mean you're receiving anything.
Well, that means that, well, in a way you are.
You're receiving the results of all those neurons firing in directions that they're not sure of.
You're getting those, so you're certainly receiving that.
Now whether the brain actually receives and transmits anything, we have not detected it
electromagnetically yet.
That doesn't mean it is not, so it doesn't mean that some sort of communication doesn't occur on, oh, I don't know, perhaps a, what's the right word for it?
There's a nanotechnological answer for this, but at the quantum level, that's what I meant to say.
It may well be there's something occurring at the quantum level, But that's way ahead of us, and with what electromagnetic spectrum we have checked, we haven't found any transmission or anything aimed at the brain.
Doesn't mean it's not there.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hey Art, this is Len from Dallas.
Yes.
About the guns, you know, if they try to take our guns away, I've never committed, I'm not a criminal, you know?
I've always had a gun.
If they order us to give our guns up, that's going to make me a criminal, because I'm not going to do it.
Right.
Well, you and many others, sir, that's right.
I know.
And I don't think the American government is dumb enough to try to tell Americans to give up their guns.
You might be able to get away with that in Australia.
You might be able to get away with that in other, more socialist countries.
But not here.
Not Americans.
No way.
Now, I know that it's occurred in certain specific areas.
New York City, for example.
San Francisco, Bay Area, California in general.
Some certain areas.
But other than that, I think that any order for Americans to give up their guns would be met with walls of lead.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Yes, hello.
Art?
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
Thanks for taking my call.
Uh, Courtney and Mitchell South Dakota, listening on 1490KORN.
Happy to have you.
What's up?
Yeah, I guess I'm just kind of weighing in on the gun debate.
And, uh... I don't even see why it's a debate.
What debate?
Well, I guess it's more of a comment about... Sorry, sorry about the word debate.
I'm a little nervous.
No, I'm being a little facetious.
To me, there is no debate.
There's just, you don't give up your guns.
And when you do, you can imagine what would happen, and what did happen in Australia, what I just read you.
And I'm agreeing, I'm an NRA member myself, but I was just going to extrapolate just a little bit and wonder about, you say you live in a fairly remote area?
That's right.
Now, don't you think that would really make the politicians mad, seeing people in remote areas, just because they are isolated and not In a more observable community as a city, where people in cities... I'm not following you.
Make them angry.
Why?
Well, the people in cities are easier controllable, more easily controlled.
Oh, I suppose.
You know, all of this would be true only if they had designs on us, which I don't really believe they do.
But we've got to keep our eyes on them.
The media really portrays people in remote areas as backwards type of people.
Well, the hell does the media know?
Well, obviously... You know what?
I've got a couple things to say about that.
For example, the kind of thing you just said is an attitude that comes from people, you know, in the Northeast Corridor, for example, in New York City, in those kinds of areas.
They may look down on the rural people as being somewhat less But here in the rural area, sir, we're bigger than that.
We tolerate people from New York.
We tolerate people even from Brooklyn, and find that they're good souls, and they need not have such feelings.
I guess living in the city under all that pressure does that to them.
Yeah, that's true.
I'm just happy to be from the Midwest, and I'd just like to thank you for your show, and you're doing a great service, Art.
Have a great night, sir, and thank you very much.
There is a kind of an attitude that prevails in the Northeast Corridor about people in the rest of the country.
And that's alright.
We're bigger than they are.
We need not retaliate with our own thoughts vocalized.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Good morning, Art.
Morning.
I think the concealed weapon carry laws in each various state should be integrated into a more uniform concealed carry program.
We're working on it.
I sure hope they'd work on it soon because if you go to New Jersey or New York, you sure can get in trouble if you're from Alabama or Georgia.
Yes, I know.
I know.
They're working on it.
Now, how many states might participate in that and whether it would still apply to cities where you've got You know, like New York City, for example.
I don't know.
But, you know, I think generally there's going to be reciprocity amongst most of the states.
Here in Georgia, I believe we have reciprocity in about seven states surrounding us.
That's excellent.
But I had a dinner with a politician here about three years ago, and he said they'll never outlaw guns.
They'll just outlaw the bullets.
Yeah, I've heard that.
And I don't know if I buy that either.
Plenty of ammunition available.
I don't think any of that's going to happen in our lifetimes.
Now, that's not to say that in another 100, 200 years, there'll be outlying phasers or something.
What do I know?
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Art, it's Barry from Pennsylvania.
Yes, Barry.
I want to talk about the high price of gasoline.
Good.
Somebody better.
It's out of control.
I have a delivery business, and it's costing me at least another $200 a week.
To run my business.
See, that's what we need to be afraid of.
People like you, sir, just in business, out all across America, another $200 onto the tab every week for you.
And if that has not yet squeezed you out of business, just wait until it goes up another buck or buck and a half.
I mean, at some point, there's a breaking point for you.
See, now, my neighbor, he's an over-the-road trucker.
He's independent.
I'm asking him, how are you able to do this?
He's telling me that his broker is kicking him back money because they're charging the customer more.
He told me his fuel bill last week out of his pocket.
Now, mind you, he drives an 18-wheeler.
It's $200.
He said he got over $900 back from the broker because they're subsidizing the fuel.
Well, over the road truckers are making it.
That's the only... I'm here on the East Coast.
I'm seeing $2.30, $2.40 a gallon for diesel.
Oh, yeah.
Look, eventually, it's coming out of the consumer's pocket.
The price of everything is going to go up.
This whole fuel thing could drive us right into an inflationary period that could knock us for a loop.
I mean, I did a whole show on this.
I listened.
And I'm right.
What's your opinion?
Do you feel that we are running out of gas?
Out of, you know, the fuel?
Or do you think this is just big business trying to squeeze us?
I think, sir, that the long emergency, that was the title of the article that I read, and by the way, I've scheduled the author of that Rolling Stone article on the show.
So, I thought you might be interested in that, those of you who thought that that was an inspired article.
The man who wrote it in person is even more inspiring, very vocal.
It's called The Long Emergency, and in answer to your question, caller, no, I don't think we're running out of oil.
I think that we're at the top of the bell curve, which means we have already extracted the first half of the known reserves in the world.
We've already taken them out of the ground, the second half.
...is going to be much harder, much more expensive to extract.
So we're not out of oil, but the price of oil is going to spiral to a point that it could do irreparable damage to our economy.
That was kind of the point made in that article, and I was so impressed with that article that not only did I read the bulk of it to you here on the air, but I also invited the author, who wrote for Rolling Stone magazine, onto the program.
That'll be here coming up in the next couple of weeks or so.
Coming up next...
Is, uh, Dr. Raymond Moody.
I've known Raymond for many, many years.
Probably the top of his field, his field, his near-death experience.
It's a wild one.
It'll be a wild show.
coming up next I'm thinking of time to demonate
To realize just what I have found I have been only half of what I am
It's all clear to me now I'm thinking of time to demonate
To realize just what I have found I have been only half of what I am
It's all clear to me now I'm thinking of time to demonate
It don't come easy You know it don't come easy
I'm thinking of time to demonate You wanna see the blues and you know it don't come easy.
You don't have to shout all these profiles, you can even play them easy.
Forget about the past and all of your sorrow.
You're the future of life.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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and dialing toll free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is indeed. My guest coming up, Dr. Raymond Moody, is probably the great-grandfather of this whole near-death
experience thing.
He wrote the book, you may recall, Life After Life.
Remember that?
And many others.
So, coming up in a moment, Raymond Moody is the foremost expert on the phenomenon of near-death experience, as well as a compelling lecturer on the subjects of evocation of the deceased, cult activities, out-of-body experiences, and the paranormal.
And the relationship of the paranormal to the performing arts and the interconnections between humor and health.
Humor and health.
Laugh and live.
He's appeared on several national television programs as an expert guest about these subjects.
He holds both a Ph.D.
from the University of Virginia and M.D.
from the Medical College of Georgia.
An award-winning author and scholar, Dr. Moody received the World Humanitarian Award in Denmark in 1988, as well as a bronze medal in the Human Relations category at the New York Film Festival for the movie version of Life After Life.
An impassioned researcher, Dr. Moody first became interested in the phenomenon of near-death experiences during his medical training.
How about that?
on since that time he has written seven books about the subject and created the
dr. John Dean Memorial Theater of the mind a facility that enables people to
experience altered states of consciousness for the purposes of
education entertainment and spiritual advancement dr. Moody in a moment
I guess it's been better than a decade that I've been interviewing dr. Moody
Welcome to the program, Dr. Raymond Moody.
Well, thank you, sir.
I am so happy to be back on your program, too.
Great to have you.
Doctor, just before I got on the air tonight, I was on my hobbyist ham radio, and a friend of mine is a retired physician, sort of retired.
I guess he still does some surgery, I believe, as a surgeon.
And we were discussing the fact that you were coming on, on Show Wave, and he said, well, you know, he didn't scoff at the whole thing because he's encountered it several times in his career as a surgeon.
He's encountered it, so he knows about it.
But you know what he said?
He said, You know, I can think of a number of explanations that would satisfy both the doctors who scoff at this and the people that have the experiences, and both of them could be telling the truth.
Is that an attitude you find among many physicians now?
I really think it depends very much on, you know, not all.
Physicians don't speak with one voice on this, but you know a lot of the people who think that this can be readily explained, tell us that they think that what this is, is the terminal events of the brain, that as the oxygen is being deprived, the mind constructs these hallucinations, which really are just the The biochemical and electrical events taking place under those stressful circumstances in the brain.
The real difficulty that I find with that are two things.
Number one, we know now very well that these same experiences of getting out of the body and seeing this light and meeting up with the relatives of the Take place not just to the patients who are dying, but also to the bystanders.
That is, people standing around the bedside as Grandma dies will tell us that as the person in the bed passes away, they themselves leave their physical bodies, say goodbye to their grandmother that they now see there in spirit form.
See Grandma recede into this light and see relatives and friends of the deceased person seem to come to meet them and to have a reunion.
And then, as this experience closes off, they feel themselves drawn back into their bodies and standing there beside the now deceased body of the person in the bed.
There's not any question of the bystanders having any physiological distress.
They're not even sick.
No, but again, let's go back to the person having the experience.
There are physiological facts that are occurring.
There are things that are occurring.
The oxygen deprivation is real and there are changes going on in the brain.
So, from a purely medical perspective, Doctor, what would the expectation be?
Well, I think that, you know, before I went to medical school, I had philosophy training.
I got my Ph.D.
in philosophy, and the real difficulty here is what's called the mind-body problem, and that is that we just don't really have any idea how the mind is related to the body.
I mean, this is not in any way to denigrate the neurophysiological research and so on.
I mean, obviously there are correlations, but the real problem philosophically is that we just can't comprehend how all of these physiological events relate to consciousness, even if we had a complete map of every single biochemical event taking place in the brain.
That still doesn't add up to our inner experience of consciousness.
There is still an unfathomable gap there, and that's what we call the mind-body problem.
You know, it's very easy for people, especially I think in the early stages of their career, to fall prey to what's called epiphenomenalism, and epiphenomenalism is the point of view that What we experience as consciousness is just a sort of an illusion, and that the real, where the action is, the reality is the brain process, the electrical and chemical events taking place in the brain.
I'm sorry, if I could just ask one question before I forget it, and that is, I've heard that it's possible To create this near-death experience, this separation from the body experience, with electrical stimulation to a certain part of the brain, is that true?
Yes, and not just by various kinds of brain stimulation, but also, as the shamans knew, by all sorts of other techniques as well.
Even gazing into a mirror will do it, you know, the many shamans.
Catapulted themselves over into other realms of reality by mirror-gazing, or as with the Cherokee, gazing into clear ponds and lakes and so on.
Or conditions of sensory deprivation, or sometimes just spontaneously.
You know, it's a fairly common experience, apparently, for astronomers standing and gazing into the interstellar reaches through their telescopes.
out-of-body experiences or or are performing artist uh... playing great music
sometimes talk about the out-of-body experiences what i'm telling you really is that i don't know i mean
there's all kinds of people who will give you
from opinion uh... i had a i had a caller uh... in the last hour of his
screen at or the end of his call something about dmt and then left hysterically
and hung up So that might be another yet another...
Well, yes, there are drugs that can do it.
But still, the real difficulty, I think, is what is the relationship between the mind and the body?
And I am very comfortable with saying, I don't know.
Until we solve that one, I think that this is all going to remain a question mark.
I mean, I'm not putting down the people who do these kinds of various experiments where Well, none of it invalidates anyway.
My friend, the doctor, had one more thing to say to me.
He said, of all the people that I've had contact with as a physician who had this experience, one thing I can tell you for sure, it had a profound and lasting effect.
It changed their lives.
There you go, and that's the most intriguing part of this to me.
I mean, it's really fascinating to see how this experience continues to unfold in their lives, even decades and decades later.
That's right.
The first person I ever talked with personally who had such an experience was in 1965.
It was Dr.
George Ritchie, who was then a psychiatry professor at the University of Virginia, and I was a third-year philosophy major at UVA at that time.
Three years before that, I had read an identical account in Plato's Republic, which is how I first got interested in this, and then when I heard it three years later from Dr. Ritchie, I realized that it was not just an ancient Greek phenomenon.
And so I've been following Dr. Ritchie now for 40 years and in all that time I can just absolutely say without any hesitation that he remains the finest person I've ever known in my life and obviously profoundly moved by this experience decades and decades after it happened.
Well, to get you sort of re-aimed in your career in this direction, it must have taken a very profound experience of somebody's or that you were part of to move you this way.
Yes, it has been.
Although, as I reflect on my career, really all of the major things in my career were pretty much set back in 1962 when I took a really fascinating course on the ancient Greek I've read classics and learned all about these oracles of the dead, the institutions in ancient Greece where people went to actually call up the spirits of the deceased, and read Plato's reflections about near-death experiences and so on, and just sort of continued to trace those lines of thought out throughout my career, and have become really, as happens to most scholars I think,
Increasingly baffled about this.
One of the easiest things for me to say is, I don't know.
All right.
Well, having said that, it's been quite a while since we talked to you last.
What are the new developments in the near-death world?
There must have been quite some numbers since we last spoke.
Experiments are ongoing.
The experiences are ongoing.
What's new?
The thing that's come out in recent years, because of changes in our population, has been the rise of a tidal wave, really, of these empathic death experiences.
Experiences where the people standing beside the bed say that they have the same experience that we know of now as the near-death experience.
That's really a new one to me.
How common is it?
I think that these probably now are just as common as near-death experiences, maybe even more so.
The first one I heard was in 1972 from one of my own professors of medicine who said that her mother collapsed and had a cardiac arrest right in front of her and she vigorously tried to resuscitate her mother and her mother did pass away, but she said from her experience she As her mother died, she actually got out of her own body, looked down, saw her own body standing beside her mother's now deceased body, trying to resuscitate it.
To use her exact words, I was trying to get my bearings, she said, and looked around, saw her own mother, again to use her word, now in spirit form, there beside her, said her goodbyes to her mother.
Saw her mother's spirit recede off into the distance toward this light.
Saw relatives and friends, some of them she recognized as friends of her mother's who had died, others she didn't know but she surmised they had been friends or relatives of her mother's who had died before she was even born.
And saw them all, after this reunion, be sort of drawn back into this Aperture, as she said, a bright light beaming from it.
She said, as this aperture closed, it closed like the lens of a camera does, spiraling down.
And then she found herself there beside the body of her now deceased mother.
I think probably in 1972 those were quite rare.
When I went to medical school in 72, The practice we all fell into, because this is what everybody did, was that when the patient was dying, the doctors and nurses would come in and we would sort of usher the family out under the theory that this would be too overwhelming for them.
Nowadays, in the intervening 30 years, it's changed entirely.
It's much more common that the doctors and nurses make themselves scarce.
And the family to be there.
And that coupled together with the fact that the baby boomers are now losing their parents in huge numbers and are there at the bedside when this happens.
I think it's bringing around a tidal wave of these things.
Okay, that's a good answer.
But just if you want to guess for me, you're welcome to guess, what does this suggest about the nature of the event itself?
In other words, Is it a local event that perhaps has some sort of field or some sort of area of influence that goes beyond the immediate area of the person dying?
Maybe so.
Having been there at the bedside of a lot of patients as they passed away, including now quite a number of my own relatives, Definitely there is a sense in which something very extraordinary and even indescribable goes on.
It does feel like some sort of opening takes place.
And you know, once in a while things happen at the bedside of a dying person that just really don't make a bit of sense.
Time after time you see cases where patients are terminally ill.
They're just withering away.
They lapse into obtundation.
They become unconscious.
Looks like everyone standing around just assumes that they'll never see grandma again and yet the breathing and the heartbeat goes on sometimes for days on end.
Everybody assumes that they'll never have any conscious contact with this person again.
Right.
And then, everybody's just kind of waiting for their heart to stop beating.
And suddenly, Grandma sits up in the bed.
If you have seen this, and I'm sure a lot of listeners have actually seen this, you will know what I'm talking about when I say, They seem more alive than alive.
It's absolutely uncanny.
I've heard over the years of this moment of absolute lucidity just before death.
That's what you're talking about?
Yes.
It even has a name.
It's called fey.
F-E-Y.
If you look up in the dictionary, it's a state of heightened awareness that portends imminent death.
And they call their relatives together.
They can even give a message To everybody standing around the bedside.
Is there any physiological explanation for this?
Not that I know of.
I mean, you know, it's easy for people to say, oh, there's a sudden surge of adrenaline and neurotransmitters and all, but the question is, how do we know?
I mean, I think that people are so threatened by this in a way that they're naturally drawn to throw some sort of explanation at it.
As I said, I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm just, to me, one thing that's so curious about this, and again, I'm sure that lots and lots of people who work in hospices and with the terminally ill will know exactly what I'm talking about, about this, that it seems that they almost light up.
There's almost a glow that comes from them.
Oh, ten years ago or so, a guy from Australia came all the way from Australia.
Doc Doctor, hold that story.
We'll get right back to it.
We're at a break point here at the bottom of the hour.
Faye, that moment of absolute lucidity.
Fascinating stuff from a fascinating man.
Dr. Raymond Moody, foremost researcher on near-death in the world.
In the high desert in the midst of the night, which is where we belong.
Of course, this is Coast to Coast AM.
Good morning.
On a morning from a Boviard movie, in a country where they turn back time, you go strolling through the cropland, keep
On a morning from a Bogart movie In a country where they turn back time
He goes strolling through the cropland He eats a lorry, to bathe in his prime
to Laurie contemplating his crime.
She comes out of the sun in a silk dress Running like the one of the gun and the rain
She comes out of the sun in a scum dress, running like a water gun in the rain.
The End La la la la la la la la
The end.
Oh Oh
La la la la la la la la La la la la la la la la
By the time he was done He had passed out of his gown
Romeo and Juliet, altogether in eternity Forty thousand men are waiting every day
Forty thousand men are winning every day Forty thousand coming every day
And did I say oh come on baby don't fear the reaper Baby take my hand don't fear the reaper
In the end of the climb don't fear the reaper Baby I'm your man
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From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is indeed an honor to have the world's expert on near-death experiences, Dr. Raymond Moody, with us this night.
he'll be right back this whole thing of uh...
the people adjacent to those who die having an experience and that now being mostly family
members.
I certainly do understand that these days the doctors and health care professionals toward the last do tend to perhaps evaporate in terminal cases allowing the family close by.
So now of course the families are reporting these kinds of experiences Where they were not previously, simply because most of them were not present.
As the doctor said, they tend to be ushered away.
But, to me, that would mean that the healthcare professionals, the doctors, the nurses, the ones who were there, for the most part, during the last moments of a person's life, would have had those experiences and perhaps didn't report them, or do you think, doctor, Just before we get back to the story you were telling, do you think that they simply became immune to them in some way, by blocking them in some way, in other words, not wanting to have them?
You know, back in the 70s, I actually heard quite a number of stories from doctors who told me precisely that, that they had all sorts of experiences like that when patients I heard this quite a bit back in the 70s, both from doctors and nurses.
Did any of them report they were able to block them in any way?
In other words, become professionally detached to the point that they were not affected?
Not that I...
I don't remember ever hearing anyone say that.
As a matter of fact, I remember a very nice oncologist I met back in about 1973 or 74 telling me that he had made it a routine that when his patient passed away, he would stay in the room with them for about 30 minutes or so, talking with them.
He had no idea whether these near-death experiences he had heard were, quote, real, unquote, or not, but rather that he was convinced that, at least from the perspective of the patient, something was still going on, and so he would stay around with people to comfort them.
You know, I think, as in any other profession, there are all kinds of different And to some people this would be very threatening, but you know, in our society there's a certain tendency, I think, to villainize doctors and so on, but some of the kindest and most sensitive people I've known in the course of my life have been physicians.
After all, that's why most of them go into medicine, is that they want to help people, and I've heard quite a number of reports like this from physicians. You know, Art, one thing
I hear all the time is that, oh, poor Dr. Moody. He suffered under the medical
profession. You know, they tried to drum him out of the medical profession because of this
research and so on. And that makes a really great story, so much so I wish it was true almost,
because my wife says that I do have a little bit of a martyr complex. But in the
reality, when I went to medical school in 72, I had already been researching this for years.
And so since I went the Ph.D.
in philosophy route, some of my friends that I had grown up with were ahead of me in medical school.
Some of them were residents and so on.
So by the time I entered medical school in September of 1972, my friends had spread the word among the faculty, this student coming in in September, doing this
research.
Oh no, they knew about it ahead of time?
Well, as a matter of fact, yes.
And within two weeks, Art, I can sit here and remember eight professors that went out
of their way.
There probably were more, but I remember eight.
Went out of their way to contact me and to say, either, thank God you're doing this research
because I had this experience myself or the others that...
Thank God you're doing this research because I've seen this with my patients and I'm really curious.
Gee, I would have thought they'd have made the life of a young medical student who believed this kind of thing totally miserable.
Well, you know, like I said, that's a better story.
But the fact is quite otherwise.
Matter of fact, just very shortly after I got to medical school, Claude Starwright, who was one of my Hematology professors.
As I recall, he was the first one to telephone me and came over to my house to see me and talk about this because, you know, a lot of physicians were seeing this.
Right after Life After Life was published in 1975, I started getting letters from all over the country from physicians who had been finding this among their own patients.
Sure.
The techniques of cardiopulmonary resuscitation were so widely available at that time that this was just happening to lots and lots of people.
I didn't want to take you away from your story, the Australian story, altogether.
Yes, talking about this man who came to see me from Australia and what had happened to him was that his wife, they had been married many, many years, had a terrible illness and she was just withering away.
One day, he was going to go out to the store for a few minutes, and so he just went and sat beside his wife, who was in bed, and he said that she was transformed.
She seemed healthier than he had ever seen her before.
And so, of course, at this point, he concluded, Oh my God, she's getting better.
She's going to live through this.
And they had a very heartfelt conversation.
Was it Faye?
Was it Faye?
Yeah, absolutely.
She was right there on the verge of death and so he went out of the house expecting that his wife was going to recover and when he came back a few minutes later she had passed away and so just before death there's this dramatic turnaround, and as he was describing this to me, I wish I could portray for you the look that he had on his face.
He said that as he reflected on this incident subsequently, he said, I felt at that point, he said that she already had one foot on the other side.
So this is very dramatic and very memorable, and I'm quite sure that lots and lots of people who are listening to us tonight can relate experiences like this from their own families and so on.
There's no doubt about it.
What about near-death experiences of people who have attempted suicide?
Are they in any way different?
No, they're not.
And the person who's an expert on this is Dr. Bruce Grayson.
of the University of Virginia who like me has interviewed thousands of patients with near-death experiences beginning Bruce did in 1975 was the first case of this he found and Bruce is an emergency psychiatrist so in a typical week's work he gets to interview several people who've attempted to kill themselves and some do and some do not have near-death experiences under these circumstances So what Bruce did was to follow these two groups for a long period thereafter, and he found that whereas the people who did not have a near-death experience when they attempted suicide continued to have a high rate of subsequent attempts to kill themselves, the people who did have a near-death experience had an essentially zero rate of any further attempts.
Okay, one other quick question.
Forget suicides for a second.
Of those who have near-death experiences, what percentage report an NDE?
Of those who go into clinical arrest, what percentage actually report NDEs?
It's rather small, isn't it?
It is rather small, interestingly.
There was a study reported in the British Journal of Medicine a few years back that did a study of I think 600 plus survivors of cardiac arrest in Holland.
Yes.
As I recall, about 18% of them reported these experiences.
But you know, an interesting thing that I have noted over the years is that there seems to me to be a tendency whereby older physicians, like people who have been in the business for a long time, tend to estimate this as higher.
In other words, the older they get, the higher the percentage that they estimate.
I talked in about 1980 with a cardiologist at St.
Luke's in Denver.
What was that guy's name?
It will come to me.
Anyway, he was a very experienced cardiologist.
He told me that he thought that about 60% of the patients that underwent a cardiac arrest
experienced something like this.
Fred Schoonmaker was his name.
And Fred was the kind of guy that you could naturally talk with.
You know, he's just very easy going and so on.
And I think there's probably some, my guess is that patients would be less likely to talk
with someone who came on as a sort of harsh and scolding figure, whereas they might be
more likely to open up to someone who's more easy going and personable.
And so that's a factor that makes it, I think, essentially impossible to get a really accurate
estimate.
I'm sure there's a lot of don't ask, don't tell philosophy here.
So some percentage, no doubt, just simply never reported.
I can understand that.
It would still have a profound effect on their lives, I'm sure.
Can you describe the typical, is there a typical NDE, doctor, that you could describe, or do they vary so very much?
I guess it would be interesting if more of them had similarities than not, wouldn't it?
Yeah, I mean, there are variations, wide variations, but they seem to be variations within limits, and that is that there's about 15 or so common elements that crop up again and again in many stories.
And one person may have three or four of those things, or seven or eight, or nine or ten, or the whole spectrum of it.
And it looks as though the longer a person is in a state of cardiac arrest, the more likely they seem to be to report more of these features.
So it seems that the experience gets deeper the longer the cardiac arrest persists.
And how many of these are reported as positive versus negative?
Well, most of them are reported as positive.
In this part of the experience where people say that they see their whole life portrayed around them in a panorama, they see everything they've ever done there at once, in full color, three dimensions, And when they re-witness the events of their lives, they see them not from the perspective they had when they were doing these things, but rather they are watching themselves as a third person.
And when they see themselves doing something unkind or unloving to a fellow human being, they feel empathically the bad feelings they've brought about in this other person's life.
And conversely, when they see themselves doing something loving to someone else, they feel
the good feelings.
And in that situation, obviously, I mean, all of us have done things that, I mean, I'm
not looking forward to seeing a review of my life, let's put it that way.
And so there's always unpleasant aspects of it.
What people say, though, retrospectively about this panorama is that they're very glad they
went through it because it convinces them that what life is all about is trying to learn
to love and to growing in wisdom.
In terms of the really negative, hellish experiences, Mark, you know what I think?
Again, I would have to refer to the work here of Dr. Bruce Grayson, who's done a special study of negative near-death experiences, and he finds, number one, that they seem distinctly rare compared to the other more positive near-death experiences that we think of, and that, secondly, there's a lot more variability to them.
That they fall into three major categories.
I forget the first two categories, but the third and rarest category of them is the full-blown hellish experiences.
Now, there's a certain kind of mentality.
I call them the funda-Christians, although they could be the funda-anythings.
You know, they kind of want there to be a lot of hellish experiences to back up their Religious ideology.
I wonder if many of these report this life review, because I've often thought that life review is a way of causing you or making you judge yourself.
And so I wonder if the hellish experience follows that life review, or if the negative ones even report a life review.
That would be interesting, and I think that that's a very difficult thing to say.
To figure out now, because number one, they seem distinctly rare, and number two, because as it now appears, one of the fundamentalists who wrote a very lurid book on this, with all these alleged hellish near-death experiences he had found, it looks as though he probably was making it up.
He was quoted as saying someplace, well, you've got to scare people to convert them and so on.
Yes.
And I just don't trust that information.
I trust Dr. Bruce Grayson, who did, I think, a very thorough and thoughtful study on this.
And he says that they occur, certainly, but they seem to be rare.
But then what do you make of that?
I mean just because there are not many hellish near death experiences, you can't infer anything
about hell from it.
I just don't know.
Alright.
What would be the most fascinating NDE you've ever heard?
There is certainly one for me.
I did one on the show with a gal named Sarah that I'll never get over for the rest of my life.
What an interview.
It went on for about an hour and a half.
She had every detail down.
It was astounding.
It just floored me when it happened.
Every time I listened to it, I've listened since.
It floors me.
I mean, it just profoundly affected me.
How about you?
You know, one that I know of, actually, I haven't talked with this woman personally.
I know her ex-husband, who is a psychiatrist, but I know of this case from a friend of mine, Dr. Michael Sabom, who's a cardiologist who studies near-death experiences in Atlanta.
And he has directly interviewed this woman.
Her name is Pam.
And oh, some years ago, back in the 90s, Pam, who was at that time in her 30s, and a very respected figure in the arts community in Atlanta, was found to have an inoperable brain aneurysm.
And that is that it was in such a position that if the surgeons had gone in, It would have burst and she would have died on the table.
Right.
But the family was just not willing to accept this so they searched and searched and in Phoenix they found a surgeon who was doing a radical new procedure.
So they went out to Phoenix and the following procedure was done to Pam.
She was placed on a rotating operating table.
Oh God.
She was.
Her body was cooled.
Oh, I know this.
Doctor, listen, we're coming up to a break.
Yeah, that's right.
We are.
But all of a sudden, like a ton of bricks, it fell on me.
I know who you're talking about.
I interviewed Pam.
Oh, good.
So wonderful.
Hold it right there, Dr. Moody.
As a matter of fact, that came to one like it was on 60 Minutes.
It's a remarkable story.
Dr. Raymond Moody is my guest.
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Speaking of worldwide, my guest worldwide experts, the world's experts on end
The story you're about to hear is just astounding.
it is that happens as we approach the door of death. We'll be right back.
The story you're about to hear is just astounding. I mean, try and imagine an aneurysm in the
That's like, I don't know, it's like a blood vessel that in one part has sort of weakened and turned into a balloon, getting thinner and thinner as it expands.
And of course when it explodes, which is what an aneurysm can do, well then you're dead.
The brain floods with blood, I guess, and you're dead.
Well, Pam had an aneurysm, an inoperable aneurysm.
Doctor?
And so, the family found a surgeon in Phoenix who did a radically new procedure.
They took Pam out to Phoenix and she was put on a rotating operating table and her body was progressively cooled until she became extremely hypothermic, very low body temperature.
And then they stopped her heart Stopped her heart.
They took the top of her head off and then rotated the table so that she was upside down and they drained all the blood from her body.
All the blood out of her body.
That's right.
So obviously then everything's shut down.
Brainwave flat.
That's right.
Isn't that right?
That's right.
And no heart pumping, no blood in the body, all the blood out of the body.
This person is Yes, by the criteria that I learned in medical school, certainly.
She was dead.
Very dead.
Yep.
And so, then of course, since there's no pressure in the arteries anymore, then they could go in and they could take that aneurysm and repair it.
And then once they did that... Without the blood, it would deflate like a balloon.
That's right.
And so then there it is, just deflated, and I guess they can clip it out, sew it up?
That's right.
No more danger of hemorrhage.
So that's what they did.
How long did that take?
You know, I don't remember.
Well, I do.
About 40 minutes total.
About 40 minutes.
So this woman was dead, in effect, clinically, in every way you could measure, for 40 minutes.
Yeah, you know, I talked with her husband about this in Winston-Salem, and he was marveling about it, and I said, well, you know, that means that by the criteria, you and I Learned she was dead and he said, yep, dead as a doornail.
And so, then they sewed the top of her head back on, put her body back horizontally, began to re-infuse the blood into her body, gradually warming her up.
When her body got to a certain temperature, they restarted her heart.
And she came back to life and is vibrantly alive with this incredible story of passing out of her body, relating conversations that went on during the surgery.
She told Michael Sabom, my friend in Atlanta who interviewed her about this, that she was describing how certain tools they used in the surgery looked.
described one as looking like an electric toothbrush.
And you know, cardiologists are not heart surgeons.
So Michael, being a cardiologist, listened to this and to him it didn't ring true.
He just didn't believe the part about the electric toothbrush.
But anyway, he got in touch with the heart surgeon in Phoenix who sent him a photograph
back of the instrumentation used and there was that instrument that looked like the electric
toothbrush.
And so Pam describes this voyage out of her body, went into this other realm, was escorted back down through this tunnel or passageway by an uncle, as I recall, and then came back into her body and is fully alive.
I saw an interview with the surgeon who did this procedure and he obviously was just quite incomprehending and startled by what she said.
As the interview made it appear, certainly, I just couldn't comprehend how this could be, as I myself can't comprehend how it could be.
I can't comprehend any of it.
I'll tell you what, let me hold you there for a second.
I've got kind of a special personal line.
it just really doesn't stack up. I mean, I've heard other things. Well, I mean, there are
just so many. I'll tell you what, let me hold you there for a second. I've got kind of a
special person in line. Somebody, Tom, a doctor, sent me a quick computer message and I'm very,
very tempted to bring him on with you for just a second.
Tom, are you there?
Tom is a physician, right, Tom?
I'm an emergency physician in Washington State.
An emergency physician in Washington State.
For how long, Tom?
23 years.
23 years.
And you have something you want to say?
I'm a board-certified emergency physician, and I've been doing this for a very long time, and I've attended the deaths of an awful lot of people.
I can't believe that the story that your guest just told sort of meshes in with the story that happened to me.
I was in the emergency department late one evening when a woman had a cardiac arrest at a restaurant and she had completely collapsed, was unresponsive, and they called the ambulance.
The ambulance drove down about six or eight blocks.
Got an elevator, the service elevator, up to where she was at and when they found her she was completely unresponsive and in ventricular fibrillation.
There was no blood flow to her brain at all.
And when they arrived at the scene they put a breathing tube in her and gave her some electric shocks and her heart started breathing.
And it was about five minutes.
It was at the very, very out The very, very longest of people who suffer this kind of event come back with any kind of meaningful intellectual activity.
She was way out there.
When she arrived in the emergency department about 15 minutes later, she was, for all practical purposes, next to brain dead.
If you imagine your house with all the lights on, it's a normal person.
There was one I mean, it was that little tiny thing that you plug into the electric switch.
That was all that was left.
She had a gag reflex if you pulled on the endotracheal tooth and there was no other response in her.
She was admitted to the intensive care unit and cared for and eventually discharged from the hospital.
I sort of lost follow up on this lady.
About a year later, I was in the emergency department and there was this perky red lady complaining of some chest problems on the stretcher and I walked in and introduced myself.
We had a little chat and then I went back and looked at her old records and there was this record of this lady who had had this horrible cardiac arrest and was next to brain dead when I admitted her to the hospital.
And I said, my God, how did things go after your cardiac arrest?
And she said, well, they couldn't get me through the kitchen.
They couldn't get me through the kitchen?
They couldn't get me through the kitchen.
And I go, what?
And she said, all I remember about my cardiac arrest was that they couldn't get me through the kitchen.
And as there are things that happen, there are serendipitous events, and at the very same time that this lady was in the emergency department on her second visit, The medic who had resuscitated her in that restaurant was in my lounge eating dinner and I asked him to come over and explain the situation.
He goes, oh my God, we could not get in.
He didn't hear me talk with her.
This is completely unrelated.
I said, DeWayne, what happened to this lady at this arrest at the restaurant a year ago?
And he goes, oh, we couldn't get her through the kitchen.
The hallways in the kitchen, through the winding corridors, through the table, you couldn't
get the stretcher through the kitchen.
And they jammed their stretcher in the kitchen.
They couldn't get her out through the kitchen.
No way she could have known that.
But no way she could have known it.
And here these two independent people collaborate this story that they couldn't get her through
the kitchen.
Well, there you go.
There you go.
There you go.
So thank you, doctor.
Thank you very much.
There is one, Dr. Moody, from another physician.
There's no way.
I mean, somebody whose heart has stopped.
Well, you know, I just, yes, yes, I remain baffled by this.
You know, I've had all kinds of experiences in my medical practice.
Certainly not as much experience with resuscitation as I'm sure Tom has had.
Although a lot of that, even with the resuscitations, but primarily most of the people I've taken care of were terminally ill people that we didn't resuscitate.
And even in situations like that, some astonishing things happen.
One event occurred years ago now that I just still scratch my head and just marvel.
Basically, this is still a very personal story that I can't divulge everything about it, but let's put it this way.
I was dealing with a terminal patient and was seeing him in his house and didn't know this man that well.
I knew some of the family members, but But I didn't know this man that well.
He certainly didn't know any personal details about my life.
And on this one day that I was going to see him, I had this gosh-awful, entirely personal, and this is the part I can't relate, but it's just something that I was working on then.
It was totally unrelated to this case of this man.
But it was just a problem that was just gosh-awful and unique to me.
This was a very unique kind of situation and a problem that had come up in my personal life, not in my professional life.
Yes.
And I was just worried to death, worried sick about this all day.
Well, that evening I went over to this person's house and when I walked in the door his Daughter came up and she said, we just can't figure it out.
She said all day he's been going on and on about and then she said my exact problem that was bugging me that day.
Now, you know, I mean, I'm sure many, many other physicians could share similar things with you.
I mean, and there's not really any way, I think, within the current logic that we use of computing this or figuring these things out, but certainly when they happen to you, they're quite, I mean, they are life-changing.
Oh, yes.
This happened well over ten years ago now, this thing I'm talking about, and I still think about it almost every day.
It's absolutely bewildering to me.
Doctor, do you think there is any difference In the number of NDEs that occur to people who are anticipating death versus those who get into some sort of flash accident.
And I'm asking this for, I hope, an obvious reason.
If you're anticipating death in our modern day, we've had so much on the air in the media about NDEs that one might imagine a person would have an expectation build-up or even certainly be
thinking very hard about the possibility of an afterlife as they near their
death they know it's coming they know they've got
a fatal disease or whatever versus somebody who kathleen gets into an accident uh... didn't see it come and
didn't even give it a moment's thought and there it is
art i don't know but i will play one thing about about that is that uh...
you know back in the sixties and early seventies when i was interviewing uh...
people i had a sort of clear field as it was because there wasn't really any
publicity till the mid seventies I had a long period of time when I had people who had never heard of this.
And in 2005, when this has been so publicized I think you and I, being people who follow the media, I mean you're talking to a two or three hour CNN man here.
Yes.
Me too.
So we follow the news and we see what's going on and so we naturally assume that people are like us.
But what I have learned in my practice really is That doesn't seem to be a very accurate assumption.
Not too long ago, I worked with some cardiologists who had a practice, and because of their cardiology practice, basically it was mostly sort of well-off middle-aged men, business people, and their practice, who had the typical midlife or you know 70 and have been to their 70s heart
attack and had spent their whole life sort of preoccupied with their business and the work a
day world and so on and suddenly would have this cardiac arrest and then had these
experiences.
Well they had one of their patients had a dramatic experience like this which brought
it to the attention of these cardiologists so I was living not too far away from where
their practice was so they would call me when they got interested in this and they would
call me occasionally when they had patients who had this sort of experience.
And...
And I was just fascinated that these people who were quite well off, and you would think to be very informed, certainly very intelligent and accomplished people, Uh, we didn't have a clue about this.
I mean, yeah, they would just be flabbergasted when I, after I would do my interview and so on, and they would say, well, doctor, have you ever heard anything like this before?
And I would assure them that, uh, oh, yes.
I mean, this is quite, you know, this is exactly the kind of story I've heard from thousands of people.
And even though at that time there had been abundant, um, publicity about it, these people just hadn't heard of it.
So I think that you and I, Because of our habits, probably tend to think, sort of to overestimate the degree of awareness that people have of this.
Well, perhaps so.
But still, in this modern day, as people approach death, surely the thoughts of whether it's really all over or whether something else... Oh, that part, yes.
I mean, and that goes back to antiquity.
You know, I remember in the very first few pages or so of Plato's Republic, There's this same story that certainly as people age, when they get into their 60s and so on, and they begin to think, uh-oh, you know, my dad.
Then they really start thinking about this in a very deep way.
Of course, more is gone than is to go.
That's clear.
Do you have any advice for those of us who are now getting on in age and have to begin thinking about things like this?
Well, one thing I want to say is the sad thing is that it's kind of like when it's the 11th hour and it's a race against time.
Well, that's not the ideal circumstance for logical thinking.
Plus, and especially as we both know in that sort of circumstance, people get very vulnerable to charlatans.
I mean, you and I both know that there are plenty of people around who will give people the answers, right?
Oh, sure.
And you're like, oh, you know, I want to know whether there's a life after death.
Well, sure, buddy, I've got the answers for you here.
And of course, that's a very hazardous situation.
You know, actually, Art, something that I have been working on, actually it's my oldest continuous work, it goes back to 1963 was when I started working on it, that I have been working out a whole new kind of logic.
And I do think, actually, that it's possible for people, and especially, maybe, people I'm sorry, it's possible for them to what?
To really get closer to the truth about this.
You know, I've been telling you for years, I think that when somebody says, oh, I've got scientific evidence of life after death, that's bogus.
But I do think that we're on the verge of having a whole new way of thinking about this.
That actually will make it possible to think out this and to get closer to the truth.
Maybe one day a scientific explanation will be possible.
Dr. Raymond Moody is my guest.
I wonder what that would do to the world, don't you?
If science said, we've got it, we've got the proof, there is life after death.
what would that do to the world?
I'm going to go to bed.
I'm going to bed.
the the
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I'll tell you, if a woman can be dead in every clinical manner for 40 minutes and then come
back with a big story, if people can tell us about not being able to get through a kitchen
door, When their heart was stopped, no blood was moving.
Well, all of these things mean we don't know a lot about the brain.
We certainly don't know much about the process of death itself.
In fact, that alone is pretty scary.
What if... What if when we die, we don't intellectually die right away?
What if we are aware of things around us for Quite a while after they've zipped up the bag.
That's something to think about.
If patients know what's going on while their heart stopped and while the blood's not moving,
the brain's not being nourished, Bye.
Then that means we just don't understand all that much about death and the process of death and what really is death.
I mean, we define it in a certain way, but what if we're wrong?
Doctor?
Well, you know, I think we probably are wrong.
I mean, you know, by definition, the big mysteries of existence are big mysteries.
And, you know, to me it just That seems foolhardy for anybody to think that they would have a clear notion about that.
I mean, let's hypothesize that there is some kind of life after death, then at the very minimum we can sort of imagine that it's a transformation of some kind that's far more dramatic than we have ever experienced while we're alive.
Even just unimaginable.
So, in a way, all bets are off.
I mean, even the people who've come very close to death, about the most common thing they tell us is that they just don't have any words to describe what they went through.
And they also say that time and space, as you and I appreciate it, evaporate at that point, so that they find themselves in a timeless, spaceless existence that They can't even describe.
I'm curious.
After all the years of work and research that you've put into this area, have you come to the point, honestly, that you can tell me that you're very comfortable that when you die, there is an existence that goes beyond that physical death?
Are you certain of that now, Doctor, in the way a religious person is comforted?
No, I am absolutely not.
Number one, I think there's three ways that people have to settle this question for themselves, which is the biggest question of all.
Is there life after death?
You bet.
Some people say that they have faith that determines it for them.
I respect those people, but I'm not in that category.
Other people have had some experience, like a near-death experience.
That settles it for them, and I respect that group, but I'm not in that category.
The only path left to me is reason, and the fact is that it's just to be... I think that if people resort to reason about the question of life after death, they really need to acknowledge to themselves what that's all about is.
That they are looking for the unique legitimacy that reason provides.
Because, you know, I mean, nobody balances their checkbook by consulting the astrology column, right?
But the reason you use arithmetic is that you know, as long as you follow the rules, you're going to get the same answer that the bank does, or that the computer does, or whatever.
And that's the point of reason, that it gives us a legitimate answer, The legitimacy comes from following the rules.
So often, in this case of looking into the question of life after death, people want to say, oh yes, you know, I'm being scientific about it or whatever.
But really, all they're trying to do is to make the outcome positive.
And so then they fudge.
It's like they're deceiving themselves.
I mean, I honestly don't know.
But I think this, and I think there's hope.
And the hope that I think there is, is that I do think that there's a way to bridge, that the logic that we use is not adequate to the question, but I think that there is a way of bridging and extending logic into a new realm that will get us closer to the answer.
That much I'm convinced of, but this is the trick with that, and that is that most of the people who are interested in They think that they're interested in the question of life after death.
What it really boils down to is that they want to hear inspiring stories.
And you love stories.
I love stories.
And you know, I've heard thousands of these things, and I hope I hear thousands more.
I love stories.
Of course I love stories.
But the fact is, the stories will never, no amount of stories will ever get us to that point of certainty about life after death.
And so that's the real question, that I think that improvement can occur.
We can get a lot closer to the answer, but that it's going to take conceptual reasoning rather than just this.
All right.
Well, science is pushing forward very, very quickly.
One of the things I said at the bottom of the last hour was, you know, how would it affect the world?
If science suddenly came to some sort of absolute conclusive answer, who knows what it might be?
But in some way did determine that there is life after death.
Did something or had a communication with the dead or something that was irrefutable that proved to the world that indeed there is an existence following the physical one.
What that would do to the world?
Well you know maybe one of the reasons that we don't know is that if we can imagine that situation That maybe it would dissolve the barrier between the worlds.
I mean, suppose that we did have some sort of system of reason that could give us a sure answer, then maybe that would dissolve the very distinction.
I mean, it would be kind of embarrassing to sit around and go through your daily activities with a certain knowledge in your head that there's another dimension, you know?
It would be that we would be aware that our current existence is dreamlike, which it is anyway.
So is it necessary for the world to function to not be able to answer that question?
You know, I've often puzzled about that very thing.
It may be that there's something deep within us that people really don't want to know.
Whether there's life after death, because if they realize that if they did know, then it would make this whole existence we're in kind of illusory.
Yeah.
You've got a kind of an interesting segment in the questions lined up to ask you, and that is, I guess you did work with criminally insane people, and you've got something on serial killers and mass murderers.
What do you know about them?
How do they fit into this?
Well, I did.
I worked for a while in a maximum security unit for the criminally insane dealing with paranoid schizophrenic killers and mass murderers and occasional serial killers.
Yes.
The schizophrenics and so on, I mean, you could kind of understand that because it's as though they're in a dream.
I mean, I think it was Jung who said, the schizophrenic is a dreamer awake.
And, you know, to them, they weren't killing an innocent person.
They were killing the communist, you know, who was chasing them, or whatever, in their minds.
But the serial killers, that was very tough, because, you know, most of them are sociopaths, and you can't really tell what's going on with them, because they will just try to figure out what they think you want to hear, and then they'll figure Feed it back to you.
Really?
So you can never get a sense of a real person operating, you know, with a sociopath.
And so for that very reason, I mean, they're very enigmatic.
I could never figure out what was going on, if anything, inside a sociopath.
So in other words, serial killers are a blank to you?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you can get certain kinds of things, obviously, about them.
I mean, obviously, they get a sexual thrill from the killing.
You know, they often have an orgasm at the point they kill the person and that sort of thing.
So, to them, the act of killing is sexualized.
But there's no real honesty to them.
I mean, as I say, they just try to read you and then manipulate you to To feed back to you what they sense that you want to hear, so that you don't have a sense of a real person.
It's interesting that in all those years, I never really met in that environment.
I mean, serial killers, you just don't know what to make of them, but the paranoid schizophrenic killers and that sort of thing, and the mass murderers, I never met up with anybody in that circumstance that I felt was evil, per se.
Most of these things... We all understand, for example, what resentment is.
And, you know, a lot of these guys, the mass murderers, it was just that resentment had built up to such a degree that one day they just sort of exploded.
And, you know, I guess we've all exploded and we've all had resentment, so we can all kind of imagine what that would be like.
Evil is not something I even encountered in a In the cell blocks where mass murderers are locked up, serial killers, those kinds of people, you find them very hard to read.
In other words, they're just trying to tell you what you want to hear, but not really explain what they feel.
cell blocks were mass murders are locked up uh...
the serial killers those kinds of people uh...
you find them very hard to read you you know which is trying to tell you what
you want to hear but not really explain what they feel
i think that's right That's how it is, not just with serial killers, but sociopaths in general.
First of all, they are all very talkative, usually, and they're very charming.
That's why a serial killer can get to their victims, because they're so charming that they can get the person right in the car with them, and so on.
People think they're very nice people, and so on, often.
Well, I guess that's why a program like mine does so well, Dealing in the Paranormal.
Dealing in all these kinds of things.
These are things people want to know about.
They really do.
Certainly the people in this audience, for the most part, really are curious about this type of thing.
And that leads us into investigations of the paranormal generally.
And things that cannot be explained.
Oh, by the way, I've been asking a lot of guests lately.
I found this wonderful show on TV called Medium.
Have you seen it yet?
I haven't.
No, I haven't.
Nobody's seen it!
It's one you've got to catch.
It's called Medium, and it's extremely well done.
What is your view of mediums in general?
Well, now first of all, I've known a number of people in my life, ladies in the neighborhood, the kind of people who live down the street and who have this kind of uncanny, incomprehensible talent of being able to tell you things.
As long as it's in the neighborhood and these are very unobtrusive people who just a few people know about the talent and so on.
That's one thing.
That is genuinely baffling to me.
I've seen people like that do things that I just can't imagine what's happening.
I've seen it too and very occasionally I had an experience or so with things that are just completely inexplicable.
Yes, that's right.
And then, on the other hand, there are the performers.
I mean, you and I both know you can go down to the magic shop.
Oh, yes.
And you can buy a book that can tell you how to do this.
People are absolutely convinced that you have supernatural powers.
One thing I always tell people, and the practical way it comes up with me is this.
I do a lot of grief counseling.
And so from time to time I have people come to me and they say, well, should I go to a medium?
And I say, I mean, you know, and that is then people are putting themselves into your hands.
I mean, there's, you have to make a real, real thoughtful judgment.
And this is what I tell people.
I say, well, if you're going to do it, then you sort of owe it to yourself to read up on how some of these things can be Produced by trickery.
So I always tell people, if you want to do it, arm yourself first with information about how it can be done fraudulently, because there are all sorts of ways.
You know, one of the ways that's not very often talked about in the public domain, I've noticed, is that the fraudulent mediums work together, even though on the the outside they may be kind of like the professional
wrestling, acting as though they're bitter enemies and so on.
They actually work together, and it's been known since antiquity that the people who
worked in the Greek oracles knew that the average person who goes to an oracle is going
to show up at another oracle within the next year or two.
But isn't it, from this point of view, Doctor, isn't it a legitimate occupation?
In other words, a medium who perhaps may not be telling the truth or may be using some sort of trickery.
In a way, they are grief counselors, aren't they?
Yes, yes.
I mean, it does.
Yes, yes.
And even, I think, some of the ones who First of all, one thing I learned in my forensic work is, you know, I mean I can't make any judgments about anybody else's motivation.
I mean, you know, I remember a judge asked me one time something about somebody's motivation and I said, you know, Judge, I mean, here I am 40 years old, I can't even make a good judgment about my own motivation on most things.
And you know, he looked at me and he said, Dr. Moody, That's the wisest answer I've ever heard from an expert witness.
And so, you know, I mean, I wouldn't want to make a judgment about anybody's motivation, but the fact is, these things can be done by trickery, and so, just naturally, people who consult mediums, I think, ought to really investigate this and become educated on it before trying it out.
Alright, so you're not saying baloney?
No, no, no, no, no.
I mean, I was saying, I don't know.
I mean, I've seen things that I don't understand, and I also know that some things can be done by trickery, so that the wise person ought to consult, really become educated before looking into it.
All right, how do you do that?
Are there any books you recommend to people?
I think reading a wide array of books on it, books by people who've Investigated mediums, books by mediums, magic books that give the simple step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
You know, I had a really interesting experience about ten years ago or so, eight or ten years ago, down in Florida, Art.
I was in a lecture and I gave somebody from the audience to ask a question about psychics.
And I gave a similar sort of thing that I'm telling you about, that, you know, people ought to be careful because it can be done by trickery, but certainly we've all had experiences where we seem to know in some weird way what somebody else was thinking, and just being as I'm being now.
Well, afterwards they had a reception for me.
And I was sitting in the reception and this young woman, she was early 30s, as you could tell just by looking at her, and just from her whole demeanor, you could tell that she was a professional person from her vocabulary and the way she presented herself.
She looked like a businesswoman.
She really got on my case.
She said, Oh, you know, I went to the psychic and he told me absolutely these things.
There's no way he could have known it and blah, blah, blah.
And so I said, Well, I just imagine.
And I put my hands over my face and I sort of leaned down and I said, I just don't understand this.
I just don't understand this.
I'm sitting in your office or in the place you work and I'm pulling out your middle desk drawer and I'm looking down here in the right hand corner and it looks to me like there's some little packages of McDonald's or Burger King mustard or ketchup or something like that.
And that woman, I mean, Art, it was just like she bowed.
Like her head bobbed, and she sort of bowed.
And I know from as a psychiatrist... You knew you had her.
Absolutely.
That I could have said at that point, hop on my bus, we're joining her.
And she'd have been right there.
She'd have been right there.
But then I told her...
Hold that.
We'll be right back.
From the high desert, Dr. Raymond Moody is my guest.
How about you?
fuel catchups down there white section Never reaching the end
Letters are written You
You Good
Oh Oh
I feel Oh
Oh To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area...
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
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International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country Sprint Access number,
pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-8253.
From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
Indeed so.
My guest, Dr. Raymond Moody, the world's expert on NDE's Shelly, From Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Raté Art.
Medium is a fantastic show.
Best thing on TV right now, in my humble opinion.
I watch it every week.
Did you know it's based loosely, probably, on a real medium in Arizona?
And I know that's true.
And you know what?
I would very much like to interview that particular medium.
And you know, in the show, she's just kind of an average housewife in the employ of a district attorney's office.
Uh, because she obviously helps solve cases.
I mean, just a very regular kind of person.
The way they do the show is very appealing.
Because it's not full of hocus-pocus and baloney.
It's kind of the way you would imagine it to be in real life, if somebody had that power.
And I do believe some people have that power.
And I would love to meet the person on... on which that show is based.
Hint, hint, hint.
By the way, it's on Mondays on NBC.
Unsolicited plug.
You want to catch a good show?
Medium.
Monday.
Mondays on NBC, as they say.
Check your local listings.
In a moment... Oh, you know what?
I would like to restrict all of my phone lines to people who have had NDEs.
How about we try that?
And that means all of my lines.
Now, I may be taking a risk here.
But we've got a very wide audience and I think we can cast a pretty wide net, so I'm going to make a shot at it.
If you're not, every line obviously is lit up right now, so please just hang up.
Unless you've had an NDE.
If you've actually had an NDE, if you've experienced clinical death and really have gone through this, then Let's give it a try, all right?
Just all of the lines.
Everybody else, please just hang up.
And we'll take only calls on any of the lines from people who have really had clinical death and a real NDE.
If that's you, then let's see if we can fill the lines this hour with those people.
It may be tough, but we're going to give it a try.
So only NDE experiencers, people who have actually undergone clinical death Need apply.
You know the phone numbers, and in a moment we will continue.
Once again, Dr. Raymond Moody, and I thought we'd give it a try, Dr. Moody, in this hour
where we take calls, take it, take them from people that have actually had an NDE.
Great.
Think that's a good idea?
Yeah, yeah.
Neat.
Well, as you said, everybody likes stories.
The one about the lady with the aneurysm has been with me.
I think I saw it on 60 Minutes.
You know, they did a piece on it.
It was absolutely incredible.
And at the end, they asked the doctor, well, doctor, for those 40 minutes, where was she?
Right.
You just saw her, no?
Right, right.
I heard one a couple of years ago that's really quite fascinating, and I heard this from a well-known psychotherapist, a very fine woman, who's about my age.
I'm 60 now.
It happened to her son, who was 30 years old at the time, and it happened to him about Four years before she told it to me, and I also heard this from a cardiologist in Washington, who had also looked into the case through this same woman, psychotherapist.
And what happened was that her son, who was 30 and who was a very macho individual, specifically he was a firefighter, and you know that Generally, in my experience anyway, those are very sensitive, sweet people, but also there's a macho culture to it.
Oh, absolutely.
So this young man had, at age 30, a defecting aneurysm of the aorta, and if you are not medically informed and you don't know what that is, you're lucky almost, because I'm not going to induce Hyperventilation spells in your listeners by explaining what that is, but believe me, it is a gosh awful circumstance.
And so this, very often people with it die.
And so this young man was taken to the hospital in time and they were able to operate on him to repair the aneurysm.
But during the time in the operation, he did experience a cardiac arrest and had a near-death experience.
Now, concurrently with this, his wife was full-term pregnant.
And about this time, she was delivering her daughter.
Now, his perception was that as he went up through this tunnel, His young daughter was coming down the other way, grabbed onto him, and in his rendition of it, pulled him back into his body.
While he was in the hospital, and I saw photographs of this that his mother, as it were, showed They put his infant daughter on his chest while the, I think about three months he spent in the hospital, and the young girl was about four at that time, and the grandmother, or mother of this young man, said that the daughter and her son were just absolutely inseparable.
And you know, people often ask me, they'll start telling me a story and they'll say, oh, I guess you're bored by this.
You've heard so many of them.
And I always say, yes, yes, I find this so boring.
You're telling me that your heart stopped beating for 20 minutes and you got out of your body and you saw a light.
Yeah, I find that very boring.
And of course, what I'm getting at there is that this never gets boring.
No.
This is intrinsically fascinating.
Of course it is.
And inspiring, too.
I mean, it does give hope, because just as we can't say for sure that this does show that there's a life after death, we can't say that it's not, either.
We just don't know.
And certainly, it really does change the lives of the people to whom it happens.
All right, Doctor.
Here comes one of them.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Raymond Moody.
Hi, hello.
I'm very honored to meet you.
I've had three near-death experiences and they've been different times, each one.
One was at three and I had German measles and I don't remember a whole lot about it except I came back and scared my mother to death by saying that they sent me back.
The next one I had was about ten and I had an overdose of a medication, an injection And just went whammying out of my body so fast I didn't even know what happened to me.
And we were in the car.
My mother had taken me to the doctor and we were on our way home.
And she was driving crazy, screaming and yelling and looking straight through me and I kept telling her I was alright, you know.
Well, I turned around and looked where she was looking and I was on the seat laid out, you know.
That kind of popped me back into my body.
And the third one happened when I was around 30.
I had hyperthyroidism and my heart was going at about 160 at rest and it decided to take a little vacation and I went into the big one where you go to the light and the tunnel and the whole bit and I thought it was crazy.
I never talked about it for years.
Because this was before Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and everybody, you know.
It's really different.
What about the coming back process?
Do you remember why or how, instead of going forward like I presume most do, you came back?
With the light, it was just the light.
It was absolutely phenomenal.
Amazing.
Words.
You just don't have words.
I understand.
But again, ma'am, do you remember the return process?
Do you remember?
Well, I remember just being back in my body on that and that was not good.
Okay.
Well, a lot of people I've heard say that, Doctor.
This return process, are most people in some way notified they're going back or given a decision or what?
There's about three different patterns.
Some people say that They just suddenly find themselves back in their body and they had no sense of transition.
A second group will tell you that somebody there told them they had to go back, either this light they meet up with or a relative who's passed away, that you have to go back, it's not time yet for you and so on.
And a third group are people who tell us that they're given a choice, that they're told Either you can go back to the life you've been leading or you can continue with this experience.
Not too surprisingly, all the ones I've talked with who were given that choice chose to come back.
And it's interesting that almost universally they say the same thing.
They say the reason they chose to come back was that Yeah, I've had two of them.
My first one was when I was about 15 years old.
They said if it had been left up to them, they would have preferred to stay in the light.
But they choose to come back most frequently because they have young children.
That absolutely, of course, makes sense.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Moody.
Hello.
Good morning, fellas.
Good morning.
Yeah, I've had two of them.
My first one was when I was about 15 years old, leaving my parents' farm, going to work,
and there was a real peep show about a quarter mile away from their farm, and I was putting
I just was listening to a CD I just got, which is kind of ironic with the guest's name.
It's Moody Blues.
Yeah.
And I was jamming to that.
I was going about 45 mile an hour, and I come up this hill, and right as I popped over the hill there, there was a four-wheel drive truck coming at me about, he was probably going about 45, 50 they said.
So I had a head-on collision car wreck, and Only thing I remember is I remember floating above the wreck.
I've seen the whole accident above it.
And, uh, then I, uh, I remember about five minutes later, actually I don't remember the time going by, but the guy that was in the other truck said I was out for about five minutes.
And I woke up and, uh, when they come out to investigate the wreck, they said, well, he must have impacted here.
And I told them, no, it was about seven feet down.
I watched it.
You know, I watched Above the Rec, and they thought I was all crazy.
And then the recent one I had about two years ago, and I still don't want to talk about that one.
I'm still kind of tripping out about that one.
You fellas have a good night.
Thank you, sir.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Moody.
Hi.
I'm sorry.
Okay, I had to excise what you just said.
So let's start again with just your first name.
Right.
This is J.R.
I'm listening to you on 570 KLIF in Dallas.
Right.
I got ran over.
Oh, hello, Doc.
Hello, Art.
Yes, sir.
I got ran over when I was six years old by a truck.
A boy was chasing me across the street.
A truck backed up and he caught me and he drugged me.
And the first thing that I remember in the hospital was leaving my body.
And I don't know if it was near death or an out of body
experience because I was looking down at my body and there was like a bench and I was sitting on
this bench in my room looking down on my body and it looked like a woman in a habit, you
know like a nun?
Yes.
And a real, just the whole thing was white, there wasn't any black on it.
And she came up and sat down next to me and put her arm around me and said, it's going
to be okay.
And the next thing I knew I was waking up.
Back in your body.
Uh, doctor, everybody so far has said that, that like the first thing that happens is an accident or whatever.
And they're out of their body.
They're out of their body.
That's right.
But conscious and able to see things now.
I also remember another 60 minutes piece where they, It was really cute.
In the operating room they had, having heard all these stories, they put some numbers up where only somebody on the ceiling could see them, and tried to get people to come back and recite those numbers, you know, as proof that they really had been up and out of their body and on the ceiling of the operating room.
If they would have been, they would have seen those numbers.
The other argument The counter-argument that people have not reported those numbers back was it was not very important to them.
It isn't what they were concentrating on.
They were concentrating on their own bodies and their situation and whatever they were feeling, but not looking for evidence to repeat later.
That's right.
And not only that, but let's say that someone did be accurate, accurately report something seen under that circumstance.
What would we make of it?
I mean, there wouldn't really be even any context to interpret it.
You know, Art, one of the most interesting things I know is that the whole notion of truth that we have, the very idea that certain things are the case independently of what anybody thinks about it, It's not a notion that goes back to prehistory, as we might imagine, but it actually was formulated in about 500 BCE by an identifiable historical figure.
His name was Parmenides.
He was one of the first of the ancient Greek philosophers.
And the way that Parmenides came up with this notion is And you can verify this for yourself just by going down to Borders and getting a standard history of ancient Greek philosophy, and read about this.
But he went over to the other side, and this notion of truth was divulged to him.
And because of that long sequence of events, it went from Parmenides, then ultimately to Plato, Uh, who formulated a counterbalancing notion of falsehood, and then on into Aristotle, who formulated logic as you and I use it.
I mean, logic is a technical word, but it's incorporated now into the common thought of everybody.
And that, because of that historical, those historical events, logic, as you and I know it, is predicated on literal language.
And so, Because when we talk about life after death, we're not using a literal mode of language.
It precludes really having certain scientific knowledge about this.
In 2005, I'm not talking about 2050 or 2100, I mean for now, but to me it's just a fascinating little piece of information.
The logic we have ultimately even came from The other dimension of reality, or what was Parmenides regarded in any way, is the spirit world, the place that people go when they die, that he went to.
Alright, Dr. OBEs, are they essentially the same thing that happens to you when you clinically die?
A lot of people who have near-death experiences, as a matter of fact, very commonly in the near-death experience, people have an out-of-body experience.
That's what we're hearing.
Out-of-body experiences can also occur in other contexts as well.
For example, like astronomers looking through their telescopes sometimes get out of body, or it happens to people sometimes just spontaneously.
So you don't have to be near death to have an out-of-body experience.
But if you are near death, that's a very common Uh, circumstance in which people get out of their body.
So far, each person has said exactly that.
And then I've talked to all these people, interviewed many people on OBEs, and it does seem like they're sort of exactly a similar process at that point.
In other words, out of the body, but able to observe everything around them.
That's right.
And sometimes able to accurately describe what was going on in the circumstance, too, as I've known from Many of my patients, and from people who've related this to me.
Well, so many doctors have heard that.
How do they explain that?
I mean, the prisoner's out cold.
They've got no heart moving.
They've got nothing feeding the brain.
They couldn't possibly know these things, but they know them.
Art, I don't know.
It just, I mean, I just don't know.
I think it's in my practice that I really It certainly inspires me to go on to try to learn more, but I would be foolish to think that, to say that I have the answer to that.
All right.
Dr. Moody, hold it right there.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Dr. Raymond Moody, the world's foremost authority on NDEs, and still there are many things to which he responds properly, I might add.
I don't know.
It's refreshing to hear sometimes.
I'm Art Bell.
Good enough to be strong, we gotta get it right, that's where we started from
Do you remember that day?
I sure do remember that day When you first came my way
I said no one could take your place And if you get hurt
If you get hurt By the little things I say
I can put that smile back on your face When it's all right and it's coming along
We gotta get it right, that's where we started from Love is good, love can be strong
We gotta get it right, that's where we started from I'm Art Bell.
We're talking with Dr. Raymond Moody, and we're looking for people on the lines who have had actual NDEs.
Probably clinically dead, that sort of thing.
That's what he specializes in.
So if that's you, please give us a call.
If not, sit back and listen.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free
at 800-825-5033. From west of the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country Sprint Access
number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Another very interesting thing that I know just with a few people that I've talked to who say they've had MBEs, more than not, They've had several, not just one, but several.
I wonder if that's common, we'll ask.
You're done.
Once again, Dr. Raymond Moody and Doctor, you've written a lot of books.
What are you working on now?
What's coming next?
Well, you know Art, actually, just in the next few days I'm going to open a new website called RaymondMoodyInstitute.com and I'll be putting out daily reflections on that and been doing a lot of research in the last Yes.
on a fascinating phenomenon, art, that I call the swan song phenomenon.
This is something I have seen for years and years but finally have accumulated enough
cases that I can make some sort of good statement on it.
And basically what I have found out is that it is very common, not as common as near death
experiences or empathic death experiences, but still quite common that people in the
hours or day or so or sometimes minutes before they die will suddenly start reciting poetry
or sometimes even making up poetry on the spot or singing.
And even when you talk to the people who are left behind, they say that, you know, as far
as they knew that their relatives who had passed away had had...
Absolutely no interest whatsoever in poetry while they were alive, and yet, right there on the verge of death, start erupting into poetry.
And you know, I've looked a lot into this, and I have found that the ancient Gnostics, for example, at least one sect of them, that as a spiritual practice, while they were alive, they would make up these elaborate songs to sing just as they were dying.
And the whole idea behind this was that they believed that they could attune themselves to the other dimensions of reality they were going to be going into by singing or by reciting poetry on the verge of death.
Well, Doctor, I'm not into poetry, so if I began reciting poetry, you can be sure I was dying.
All right, we've got a lot of people on the phone.
First on caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Moody.
Hi.
Hello.
Yeah, my name's Casey, and I'm calling from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Yes, Casey.
In December 8, 2002, I was in a very horrible car accident.
We smashed through a couple of brick walls and ran into a truck, and I received a bunch of lacerations, mostly on my head, from the broken glass.
And the next thing I know, I'm hovering over the scene of the crash, and I felt myself being Pulled up, like, as reverse gravity.
And I began traveling at tremendous speeds, um, through a cloud of, like, white, a white area.
And, uh, what's really weird is I felt really powerful when I was traveling.
And the next thing I know, I was sucked back into my body in a hospital room, and that's when I awoke.
And they were, uh, feeding me, you know, plasma and everything to get the blood back in my body.
Okay, so it's like you were going up one minute, and powerful, and flying through the white light, and then the next thing you know, boom, you're back into the hospital.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was really weird.
I was traveling very, very fast.
Got it.
Alright, thank you very much.
So, are those reports common?
Oh yeah, yeah.
I've heard of this, like a sudden ascent upwards.
You know, Jung had a similar thing when he had a cardiac arrest during a heart attack in 1944. He describes
being propelled upward like that at high speed. And yeah, that's something I hear from time to
time. And again, this passage into or through the realm of light is a feature you hear again
and again in these stories.
And of course, many doctors and psychiatrists explain as the brain dying from the outside in
with the center being the last vestige of life and therefore the light.
Yeah, and you know, Art, have you ever thought about the fact that if you applied that same line of reasoning to how you perceive what you're looking at now, it's the same thing, right?
I mean, the physiologists tell us that whatever you're looking at right now, the light from your light fixtures is beaming down and bouncing off of it.
It gets reflected into your I am refracted through the lens onto the retina, and the rods and cones undergo a chemical change, and the electrochemical impulses go up into your brain.
So does that mean that what you're experiencing is not real?
I mean, you know, it's just that you can apply that same reasoning even to the experiences of everyday life.
Well, that's right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Moody.
Good morning.
Hey, good morning, fellas, again.
I was the same fellow that I had the car wrecked with combined speeds of over 100 mile an hour and I seen their accident above the wreck.
No, I got it sir, but we can only take one call per night.
Easily, one per week actually.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Moody.
Hello.
This is me.
You?
Okay, this is James from Kowloon, Georgia.
Yes, sir.
Share my experience.
I was walking up the road, facing the traffic out near Houston, and the next thing I knew, I was in a room, and I was looking at myself, and I was up in a corner, and there were three shadows.
Two were moving, and one was sitting behind a desk.
Well, was there a reason why you had this?
I mean, did something happen to you?
I had been hit by the car, and I didn't know it.
A drunk stashed away.
Oh, oh, oh!
Yeah, I wonder how many people are unaware of even what happened to them.
That's a good thought.
So, first thing, you didn't even know about the accident.
You just saw it when you were out of your body.
Mm-hmm.
And it seemed like they were having a court.
One had a real rough voice, and one had a kind voice, and both of them wanted me to go with them.
And I, you know, I was getting tireder and tireder as the thing was going on.
Finally I said, I don't care who I go with, quit this arguing, and next thing I knew I was waking up about six weeks later in the hospital.
Wow.
Six weeks later?
Yeah.
I guess they kept me, you know, kind of medicated.
Wow.
It broke my neck, back, and leg.
Oh my God.
I didn't even know what happened until they told me.
All right, so there you are, Doctor.
There's one that, uh... That's a funny one.
They had a bad cop, good cop routine.
I almost said that myself.
So, a lot of different things apparently can happen to you.
Thank you very much for that story, sir.
The intriguing part of that was that he didn't even see the accident coming.
He was just out and above.
That often happens in a situation like that.
it's called retrograde amnesia where people don't remember the actual event and sometimes
before the injury too.
Well I suppose you could be standing on a road and not see the car coming and not have
any warning whatsoever.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Raymond Moody.
Hi.
Hi, how are you?
This is Tim from Phoenix.
Yes.
Dr. Moody, I'm looking at my bookshelf.
I'm looking at the book Life After Life right here.
Yes.
One of my favorite books.
Well, thank you, sir.
When I was in my 20s, I was driving down the road, I was a musician, I had an amplifier in my front, uh, passenger side seat, and my guitar in the back, and I got hit by a lady, and the amplifier crushed my ribs, and I remember an impact, I was screaming, and I saw myself out of body, out of the car, screaming.
Next thing I know, I'm laying in the street like, uh, when you go by an accident, everybody rubbernecks and looks at the guy.
And I'm in the ambulance and my side's crushed and I'm just trying to not, you know, get into shock.
But the weird thing is, too, is when you're talking about Carl Jung is everything in the car was crushed, except for my guitar.
Even the case was crushed.
But the guitar is the only thing that survived, and I played for 20 more years after that.
Wow.
Alright, well, thank you.
Well, I hope you kept that same guitar.
Yeah, your lucky guitar.
International Line, you're on the air with Dr. Moody.
Hello.
Good evening, sir.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
I've been listening for about 10 years, and I've heard of a lot of stories.
My name is Bill.
I'm listening to CGB out of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Yes, Bill.
Superstition.
I was a young child.
My grandmother had died.
And my aunt and myself were in the room when she passed away.
And my aunt carried one of these Instamatic Polaroid cameras.
And there was smoke coming out of the register above a window.
Okay, the old steam type fed one.
Yes.
And so my aunt, why she took the picture, I have no idea.
But I saw something come out of my grandmother's body at the same time.
And later on, when we looked at the picture, It was a picture of Jesus with his hands folded down, and my grandmother survived.
She was dead for 40 minutes.
And after she got out of the hospital and was talking, and I had told her of this story, and she said that when she was in the light, Jesus told her that she still had grandchildren.
She has over 200 grandchildren, by the way, that they needed their grandmother.
And no, she had to go back.
And she remembers talking with Jesus and Jesus was in the room and a lot of people never really believed this story and I saw the picture and I was there.
Alright sir, I appreciate the story.
Doctor, do you think that people's individual religious preference dictates the experience they're going to have many times?
No.
I think that their individual religious Experience shapes the language they bring to it.
But I think that there is an underlying experience, which people will universally say that they can't put into words anyway, and that what they do is that they just bring the closest words they can find in the traditions they've known about.
And I know lots and lots of people who say that prior to this they had no Hello.
religious background or interests or beliefs and yet have an experience which transforms
them in the same way that we hear from people who have these experiences.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr.
Moody.
Hi.
Oh, hello.
Hello.
About a year ago in January, I had my daughter by emergency C-section.
My aunt died on the train.
Okay, you're kind of breaking up on us.
Dear, hold it.
You're breaking up on us a little bit here.
I'm sorry.
You're on a cell phone?
Okay, hold on.
You had your daughter by emergency c-section, and what happened to you?
I passed out for 10 seconds.
I'm sorry, you passed away or out?
Away.
My heart stopped, and I stopped breathing.
Got it.
Anywho, at first I see nothing but blackness, and I felt completely at peace, and then I seen my dad that died about two years back, and he told me that little girl needed me.
And all of a sudden I felt like I was being thrust down, and I woke up later in the recovery room.
Yep.
Alright, thank you very, very much.
It just goes on and on so many... It does!
I mean, this is just endless, sir, and you know, studies that have been done well this was many years ago
now, but the Gallup poll got interested in this and they found
That at that time some enormous number of Americans I think it was about eight million American adults had been
through something like this and this was about 1980 I believe
So, you know, we're dealing here with an experience that is really remarkably common
yeah, apparently a real phenomenon, but but
The big but of course is that Even with the lady who disappeared for 40 minutes and we
can reasonably ask where was she We've never had anybody come back who's been dead for
Well, I don't know. What's the world record doctor?
Well, I've heard people who've had extremely lengthy cardiac arrest, but now one thing that gets into the picture here that's kind of The fuddling is that we've all heard the thing about the five minute rule, right?
Yes.
That after five minutes the brain is hopelessly damaged.
Right.
The trouble is that's an excellent clinical rule of thumb, but there's all sorts of circumstances in which it doesn't apply.
For example... Drowning in cold water.
Drowning in cold water or if the person is frozen in a snowbank.
Then these apparent arrests can go on for incredible lengths of time.
And then there's another class of people where it just doesn't make sense under any circumstances.
And yet they lived.
There's all kinds of things that happen to you in medicine that just don't go by the books.
Maybe you would be willing to comment on those people who wish to be cryogenically preserved.
You know, since we know that slowing down the metabolic rate allows us a little extra time, perhaps being frozen would not be so scientifically crazy a thing to do at death, or even just prior to death.
There are people who have actually gone to courts and tried to get permission to be frozen while they're still actually alive.
You know Art, I'm thinking, I wonder if maybe technology won't someday, maybe even soon,
supersede that with all of the amazing things they're doing now with the genetic engineering
and the stem cells and all this other stuff.
Maybe that sort of complicated arrangement won't even be necessary one day.
I mean, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine today, there's a really fascinating article, for example, about stem cells and the way that they can now create sort of hybrid entities that have human cells and cells of various animal species.
Yes, I'm a little uncomfortable with that.
Yeah, I mean, there's some pretty weird stuff that's going on, and so our science is getting so far beyond the pale that we are entering almost the age of nonsense and science.
About several months ago in the New York Times Sunday and Tuesday science section, there was an article that said, really, that science has now reached a point Well, perhaps so, but there's a lot of worrisome questions with that one too.
Absolutely no sense to the mind so we may be getting into an area now where?
It will be possible to transfer consciousness on in some other way that that we don't even need to freeze the body
well Perhaps so but there's a lot of worrisome questions with
that one to transfer consciousness all the memories and With it what we what we think of as the soul or that which
leaves the body at the same time or does that leave?
Leaving only a very cold consciousness, minus something very important to humanity.
That's right.
That's right.
I mean, it's eerie.
It makes you chilled, almost, some of the things that science can do now.
It's really scary.
And I'm very liberal on this.
I mean, I vote whatever, almost.
You know that science can do.
Let's give it a try.
But things are getting really spooky in a lot of areas.
I was asking about a couple of months back.
I asked six of my friends who are very articulate and very intelligent and all very well informed and I asked them all independently the same question.
I asked them, is the notion of a magnet made entirely of plastic.
Nonsense or not?
Every one of them said it's nonsense.
But the reason that I asked that question was that about a week before, I had read in a science journal that scientists have now actually done that.
They've created a magnet that's made entirely of plastic.
Guarantee I would have said nonsense.
And so, I mean, things are changing so rapidly, and the area that's so dear to your heart and my heart are this whole area of detection of extraterrestrial civilizations.
I just, I mean, I'm just getting the increasing sense that we are right on the verge of it.
Doctor, we're also, this was our swan song.
Yeah, okay, great.
Referring to your next book.
Dr. Raymond Moody, thank you, my friend.
Thank you, Art.
Great, great talking with you.
Have a good night.
You too.
Take care.
That's Dr. Raymond Moody.
See you all next weekend.
From the high deserts, I'm Art Bell.
Good night.
This is Crystal.
Midnight in the desert Shooting stars across the sky This magical journey
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