CHAPTER ONE
Some Aspects of Today’s Experiences
The subject of life after death, quite suddenly, has become one of widespread popular interest in the Western world. In particular, a number of books purporting to describe “after-death” experiences have been published in the past two years, and reputable scientists and physicians have either authored such books themselves or given them their wholehearted endorsement. One of these, the world-renowned physician and “expert” on problems of death and dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, finds that these researches into after-death experiences “will enlighten many and will confirm what we have been taught for two thousand years — that there is life after death.”
All this, of course, is an abrupt departure from the hitherto-prevailing atmosphere in medical and scientific circles, which in general have viewed death as a “taboo” subject and relegated any idea of after-death survival as belonging to the realm of fantasy or superstition, or at best as a matter of private belief for which there is no objective evidence.
The outward cause of this sudden change of opinion is a simple one: new techniques of resuscitating the “clinically dead” (in particular, by stimulation of the heart when it has stopped beating) have come into widespread use in recent years. Thus, people who have been technically “dead” (without pulse or heartbeat) have been restored to life in large numbers, and many of these people (once the “taboo” on this subject and the fear of being considered “crazy” had worn off) are now speaking about it openly.
But it is the inward cause of this change, as well as its “ideology,” that are most interesting to us: why should this phenomenon have become suddenly so immensely popular, and in terms of what religious or philosophical view is it being generally understood? It has already become one of the “signs of the times,” a symptom of the religious interest of our day; what, then, is its significance? We shall return to these questions after a closer examination of the phenomenon itself.
But first we must ask: on what basis are we to judge this phenomenon? Those who describe it themselves have no clear interpretation of it; often they are searching for such an interpretation in occultist or spiritistic texts. Some religious people (as well as scientists), sensing a danger to their established beliefs, simply deny the experiences as they are described, relegating them usually to the realm of “hallucinations.” This has been done by some Protestants who are committed to the opinion either that the soul is in a state of unconsciousness after death, or that it goes immediately to be “with Christ”; likewise, doctrinaire unbelievers reject the idea that the soul survives at all, no matter what evidence is presented to them. But such experiences cannot be explained merely by denying them; they must be properly understood, both in themselves and in the whole context of what we know concerning the fate of the soul after death.
Unfortunately, some Orthodox Christians also, under the influence of modern materialistic ideas (as filtered through Protestantism and Roman Catholicism), have come to have rather vague and indefinite ideas of the afterlife. The author of one of the new books on after-death experiences (David R. Wheeler, Journey to the Other Side, Ace Books, New York, 1977) made a point of asking the opinions of various “sects” on the state of the soul after death. Thus, he called a priest of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese and was given a very general opinion of the existence of heaven and hell, but was told that Orthodoxy does not have “any specific idea of what the hereafter would be like.” The author could only conclude that “the Greek Orthodox view of the hereafter is not clear” (p. 130).
On the contrary, of course, Orthodox Christianity has a quite precise doctrine and view of life after death, beginning from the very moment of death itself. This doctrine is contained in the Holy Scripture (interpreted in the whole context of Christian doctrine), in writings of the Holy Fathers, and (especially as regards the specific experiences of the soul after death) in many Lives of Saints and anthologies of personal experiences of this sort. The entire fourth book of the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, Pope of Rome († 604), for example, is devoted to this subject. In our own days an anthology of these experiences, taken both from ancient Lives of Saints and more recent accounts, has appeared in English (Eternal Mysteries Beyond the Grave, Jordanville, N.Y., 1968). And just recently there was reprinted an English translation of a remarkable text written in the late 19th century by someone who returned to life after being dead for 36 hours (K. Uekskuell, “Unbelievable for Many but Actually a True Occurrence,” Orthodox Life, July-August, 1976). The Orthodox Christian thus has a whole wealth of literature at his disposal, by means of which it is possible to understand the new “after-death” experiences and evaluate them in the light of the whole Christian doctrine of life after death.
The book that has kindled the contemporary interest in this subject was published in November, 1975, and was written by a young psychiatrist in the southern United States (Dr. Raymond A. Moody, Jr., Life After Life, Mockingbird Books, Atlanta, 1975). He was not then aware of any other studies or literature on this subject, but even as the book was being printed it became evident that there was already great interest in this subject and much had already been written about it. The overwhelming success of Dr. Moody’s book (with over two million copies sold) brought the experiences of the dying into the light of widespread publicity, and in the four years since then a number of books and articles on these experiences have appeared in print. Among the most important are the articles (and forthcoming book) of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, whose findings duplicate those of Dr. Moody, and the scientific studies of Drs. Osis and Haraldsson. Dr. Moody himself has written a sequel to his book (Reflections on Life After Life, A Bantam-Mockingbird Book, 1977) with supplementary material and further reflections on the subject. The findings of these and other new books (all of which are in basic agreement concerning the phenomena in question) will be discussed below. As a starting point, we will examine Dr. Moody’s first book, which is a fairly objective and systematic approach to the whole subject.
Dr. Moody, in the past ten years, has collected the personal testimonies of some 150 persons who have had actual death or near-death experiences, or who have related to him the experiences of others as they were dying; out of these he has concentrated on some fifty persons with whom he has conducted detailed interviews. He attempts to be objective in presenting this evidence, although he admits that the book “naturally reflects the background, opinions and prejudices of its author” (p. 9) who by religious affiliation is a Methodist of rather liberal views. And in fact there are some drawbacks to the book as an objective study of “after-death” phenomena.
First, the author does not give a single entire “death” experience from start to finish, but gives only excerpts (usually very brief) from each of fifteen separate elements which form his “model” of the “complete” experience of death. But in actual fact the experiences of the dying as described in this and other recent books are often so different in details one from the other that it seems to be at best premature to try to include them all in one “model.” Dr. Moody’s “model” seems in places artificial and contrived, although this, of course, does not lessen the value of the actual testimonies which he gives.