Second, the author has joined together two rather different experiences: actual experiences of “clinical death,” and “near-death” experiences. The author admits the difference between them, but claims that they form a “continuum” (p. 20) and should be studied together. In cases where experiences which begin before death end in the experience of death itself (whether or not the person is revived), there is indeed a “continuum” of experience; but several of the experiences which he describes (the recalling of the events of one’s life in rapid order when one is in danger of drowning; the experience of entering a “tunnel” when one is administered an anesthetic like ether) are fairly commonly experienced by people who have never experienced “clinical death,” and so they perhaps belong to the “model” of some more general experience and may be only incidental to the experience of dying. Some of the books now appearing are even less discriminating in their selection of experiences to record, including “out-of-body” experiences in general together with the actual experiences of death and dying.
Third, the very fact that the author approaches these phenomena “scientifically,” with no clear conception in advance of what the soul actually undergoes at death, lays him open to numerous confusions and misconceptions about this experience, which can never be removed by a mere collection of descriptions of it; those who describe it themselves inevitably add their own interpretations to it. The author himself admits that it is actually impossible to study this question “scientifically,” and in fact he turns for an explanation of it to parallel experiences in such occult writings as those of Swedenborg and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, noting that he intends now to look more closely at “the vast literature on paranormal and occult phenomena” to increase his understanding of the events he has studied (p. 9).
All of these factors will lead us not to expect too much from this book and other similar books; they will not give us a complete and coherent account of what happens to the soul after death. Still, there is a sufficient residue of actual experiences of clinical death in this and other new books to merit one’s serious attention, especially in view of the fact that some people are already interpreting these experiences in a way hostile to the traditional Christian view of the afterlife, as though they “disproved” the existence either of heaven or (especially) of hell. How, then, are we to understand these experiences?
The fifteen elements Dr. Moody describes as belonging to the “complete” experience of dying may be reduced, for purposes of discussion, to several main characteristics of the experience, which we shall here present and compare with the Orthodox literature on this subject.
1. The “Out-of-Body” Experience
The first thing that happens to a person who has died, according to these accounts, is that he leaves his body and exists entirely separate from it, without once losing consciousness. He is often able to observe everything around him, including his own dead body and the resuscitation attempts on it; he feels himself to be in a state of painless warmth and ease, rather as if he were “floating”; he is totally unable to affect his environment by speech or touch, and thus often feels a great “loneliness”; his thought processes usually become much quicker than they had been in the body. Here are some brief excerpts from these experiences:
“The day was bitterly cold, yet while I was in that blackness all I felt was warmth and the most extreme comfort I have ever experienced.... I remember thinking, ‘I must be dead’ ” (p. 27).
“I began to experience the most wonderful feelings. I couldn’t feel a thing in the world except peace, comfort, ease — just quietness” (p. 27).
“I saw them resuscitating me. It was really strange. I wasn’t very high; it was almost like I was on a pedestal, but not above them to any great extent; just maybe looking over them. I tried talking to them, but nobody could hear me, nobody would listen to me” (p. 37).
“People were walking up from all directions to get to the wreck.... As they came real close, I would try to turn around, to get out of their way, but they would just walk through me” (p. 37).
“I was unable to touch anything, unable to communicate with any of the people around. It is an awesome, lonely feeling, a feeling of complete isolation. I knew that I was completely alone, by myself” (p. 43).
Occasionally there is striking “objective proof” that a person is actually outside the body at this time, as when people are able to relate conversations or give precise details of events that occurred, even in adjoining rooms or farther away, while they were “dead.” Among other examples like this, Dr. Kubler-Ross mentions one remarkable case where a blind person “saw” and later described everything clearly in the room where she “died,” although when she came back to life she was once again blind — a striking evidence that it is not the eye that sees (nor the brain that thinks, for the mental faculties become quicker after death), but rather the soul that performs these actions through the physical organs as long as the body is alive, but by its own power when the body is dead. (Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, “Death Does Not Exist,” The Co-Evolution Quarterly, Summer, 1977, pp. 103-4.)
None of this should sound very strange to an Orthodox Christian; the experience here described is what Christians know as the separation of the soul from the body at the moment of death. It is characteristic of our times of unbelief that these people seldom use the Christian vocabulary or realize that it is their soul that has been set free from the body and now experiences everything; they are usually simply puzzled at the new state they find themselves in.
The account of an after-death experience entitled “Unbelievable for Many but Actually a True Occurrence” was written by just such a person: a baptized Orthodox Christian who, in the spirit of the late 19th century, remained indifferent to the truths of his own Faith and even disbelieved in life after death. His experience of some eighty years ago is of great value to us today, and seems even providential in view of the new after-death experiences of today, because it is a single whole experience of what happens to the soul after death (going far beyond the brief and fragmentary experiences described in the new books), made by a sensitive individual who began from the modern state of unbelief and ended by recognizing the truths of Orthodox Christianity — to such an extent that he ended his days as a monk. This little book actually may serve as a “test-case” against which to judge the new experiences. It was approved, as containing nothing opposed to the Orthodox teaching on life after death, by one of the leading Orthodox missionary-printers at the turn of the century, Archbishop Nikon of Vologda.
After describing the final agony of his physical death and the terrible weight pressing him down to earth, the author of this account relates that:
“Suddenly I felt a calm within myself. I opened my eyes, and everything that I saw in the course of that minute, down to the slightest details, registered in my memory with complete clarity.
“I saw that I was standing alone within a room; to the right of me, standing about something in a semi-circle, the whole medical staff was crowded together.... This group struck me with surprise: at the place where they were standing there was a bed. What was it that drew the attention of these people, what were they looking at, when I already was not there, when I was standing in the midst of the room?