Afterlife (36 page)

To begin with, her attitude towards life after death was one of scepticism; she was only concerned with the psychological problems involved in accepting death.
Gradually, her study of the dying led her to the conviction that both ‘survival’ and
reincarnation are established facts.
Her own observation of death-bed visions of the dying confirmed that they often see dead relatives.
She noted, for example, that while dying children hope to be with mummy and daddy, they actually tend to see deceased grandparents on the point of death.

Her conclusions, set out in books like
Of Death and Dying
and
Questions and Answers on Death and Dying
, are not presented as systematically as those of Osis and Haraldsson, but their general outline is clear enough.
She believes that everyone knows the time of his own death, and that everyone who dies is met by dead relatives or other loved ones.
She has also come to accept that dying should be regarded as a climax of living, and perhaps as its most beautiful experience.
She is convinced that all human beings have ‘guides’ who continually watch over them, and who can be seen in moments of psychic stress.
As to the ‘world beyond death’, she has accepted two major conclusions that are stated repeatedly in the literature of spiritualism: that time in ‘the next world’ is quite unlike time as we know it, and that there is no ‘judgement’ of the dead; they judge — and punish — themselves.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s obvious emotional identification with her subject has led to accusations that she has allowed her beliefs to dictate her findings.
This may well be so.
But it is also clear that these findings are based upon the study of hundreds of cases, and that they are basically consistent with those of Barrett, Osis and Haraldsson.

By the late 1960s, the subject of near-death experiences had begun to attract an increasing number of serious investigators.
Two of these, Russell Noyes and Ray Kletti, came upon some long-forgotten work on this subject by a professor of geology from Zurich, Albert Heim, whose own near-death experience had occurred when he was leading a climbing party in the Alps in 1871.
A gust of wind blew his hat off, and as he tried to grab it, he fell seventy feet to a snow-covered ledge.
The fall only occupied a few seconds, yet he felt that time had expanded into far more than that:

Heim was knocked unconscious by his fall but survived.
And the exquisitely peaceful quality of the experience led him to begin collecting other people’s observations on climbing accidents.
He claimed that, over twenty years of research, he had discovered that 95 per cent of the victims had experienced similar feelings to his own.
Heim’s conclusion was that people who had died from falls had experienced the same feeling of peace and reconciliation at the end.

Noyes and Kletti published a translation of Heim’s observations, and added much research of their own.
Unlike Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, they were unable to accept the view that such experiences provide some kind of proof of survival.
Their own conclusion was that when man faces death, he experiences a ‘depersonalisation’ which is basically a psychological defence against death.
The result is a kind of ‘death trance’ whose purpose is to make death easy.
The sensation of seeing the whole of one’s past life also seems common to these experiences.
Lyall Watson quotes the case of a nineteen-year-old skydiver who fell from a height of three thousand feet.
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‘All my past life flashed before my eyes … I saw my mother’s face, all the houses I’ve lived in, the military academy I attended, the faces of friends, everything.’ In fact, he had a soft landing and broke only his nose.
These experiences of heightened memory have obviously a great deal in common with the ‘flashback’ experience discovered by Wilder Penfield when he touched the cerebral cortex with an electric probe during an operation on an epileptic and induced memories of childhood.

In the mid-1960s, when Elizabeth Kübler-Ross was beginning her research into the death experience, a young philosophy student at the University of Virginia, Raymond Moody, was also starting to collect accounts of near-death experiences.
One of the men who aroused his interest in the subject was a psychiatrist, Dr George Ritchie of Virginia, who, as a young soldier, had apparently ‘died’ and then revived.
In December
1943, Ritchie had been in hospital in Texas with a respiratory infection.
He began to spit blood and lost consciousness; when he woke up he saw his own body lying on the bed.
Outside in the corridor a ward boy walked through him; a man he tapped on the shoulder ignored him.
He tried to get back into his body but found it impossible.
Then Ritchie experienced some kind of religious revelation.
The room became ‘brighter than a thousand arc lights’ and a figure he identified as Jesus appeared.
After a tour of a great city in which he was shown the consequences of sin, Ritchie woke up in his body, quite convinced he had died.
Like so many who have been through the near-death experience, Ritchie insisted that it was quite unlike a dream; it all seemed quite real.

For the next eleven years, Moody went on collecting near-death experiences, quite unaware that anyone else was doing so — at this stage he had never heard of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.
Three years’ teaching philosophy convinced him he would rather be a doctor, and he took a medical degree.
Over the years, he collected about a hundred and fifty near-death experiences, was struck by their basic similarities, and wrote a short book about them called
Life After Life
.
When his publisher sent a proof to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, she commented that she might have written the same book herself.
Life After Life
appeared in 1977, and became a national bestseller.

The similarities are certainly striking.
There was, first of all, the sense of peace and happiness described by Heim, the Rev.
Bertrand and so many others.
There was another experience that appeared again and again: the impression of moving through a dark tunnel, usually with a light at the end.
‘I was moving through this — you’re going to think this is weird — through this long dark place.
It seemed like a sewer or something.’ ‘It was like being in a cylinder …’ ‘I entered head first into a narrow and very very dark passageway.’ ‘Suddenly I was in a very dark, very deep valley.’

In case after case, the person emerges from the tunnel to find himself looking at his own body.
(There were, however, many cases in which the experience began with the out-of-the-body experience.) A youth who almost drowned saw his body ‘in the water about three or four feet away, bobbing up and down.
I viewed my body from the back, and slightly to the right side.’ A woman who ‘died’ with heart trouble felt herself:

Compare this with a case described by Kübler-Ross, in which a woman in intensive care went into a critical condition, and the nurse rushed out of the room to get help:

The same thing was described again and again by Moody’s subjects: the out-of-the-body experience, accompanied by a blissful sense of timelessness.
Another recurrent feature was the perception of the ‘new body’ — shaped like the physical body that had been left behind.
Patients often became aware of this ‘new body’ when they realised they were no longer in the old one — often by trying to communicate with other people.
‘I tried talking to them but nobody could hear me, nobody would listen to me.’ ‘… they would just walk
through
me’.
The physical senses often seem to be heightened, so that seeing and hearing are far more keen than in the physical body.
But the ‘hearing’, when it concerns voices, seems to be a form of telepathy or thought-transfer.
(This again is a feature that can be found in records of near-death and after-‘death’ experiences since the beginning of psychical research: communication becomes telepathic.) There is often a feeling of awful loneliness, but this is usually dispelled when the ‘dead’ person becomes aware of others like himself: sometimes other people who have died — relatives or friends — and sometimes an entity or spirit he believes to be a guardian angel.
One man was told by such a spirit that ‘I have helped you through this stage of your existence, but now I am going to turn you over to others.’ One of the commonest experiences was of a bright light — like the ‘thousand arc lights’ described by George Ritchie — which seems to radiate a sense of love and warmth; Christians, understandably, are inclined to identify this with Jesus.
There is a sense of direct telepathic communication, without language.
‘It was like talking to a person, but a person wasn’t there.’ The ‘light’ may ask probing questions about what the person has done with his life.
And this, Moody found, was often followed
by ‘flashbacks’, a flood of memories in which the past life is seen in review.

Very often there was a sense of some kind of border or limit — like the big stones described by Wiltse.
It may be a body of water, a distant shore, a grey mist, or many other things.
The ‘dead’ person experiences a conviction that if he passes this limit, then he is permanently ‘dead’.
Until it is passed, there is a choice of returning to the body.
Since all Moody’s interviewees had returned from the near-death experience, he heard many different versions of how the return to the body was accomplished.
‘I just fell right back down to my body.
The next thing I knew I was in my body again.’ ‘… it was just like a swoooosh and I felt like I was drawn through a limited area, a kind of funnel, I guess’.
But the majority of people simply woke up and found themselves ‘alive’ again.

In a subsequent book, based on further research (
Reflections on Life After Life
), Moody observed some other interesting aspects of the near-death experience.
There were many glimpses of a ‘heavenly’ realm, and the phrase ‘city of light’ occurred repeatedly.
There was also an experience Moody calls ‘the vision of knowledge’, a flash of mystical insight into the nature of the universe:

Asked ‘In what form did this knowledge seem to be presented to you?’, Moody received the reply: ‘It was in all forms of communication, sights, sounds, thoughts.
It was as if there was nothing that wasn’t known.
All knowledge was there, not just of one field but everything.’ Moody asked: ‘One thing I wonder.
I’ve spent a lot of my life seeking knowledge, learning.
If this happens, isn’t that sort of thing rather pointless.’ The reply was:

Moody was struck by this notion of ‘forgetting’ this universal knowledge before returning to life, and cites Plato’s story of a soldier called Er — from
The Republic
— who was allowed to return from death.
Er describes how the souls who were allowed to return to earth had to first drink of the waters of the River of Forgetfulness, and some of them ‘who were not saved by good sense’ drank far too much.
Like many of Moody’s subjects, Er had no idea of how he returned to life; he simply woke up and found himself lying on his funeral pyre.
It is plain that what interests Moody about all this is the question of that barrier of ‘forgetfulness’ that seems to interpose between ‘the other world’ and the present one — and, by implication, the question of why some people seem to have escaped total forgetfulness.