My last post concerned the scientific investigation of NDEs. Here I want to speak personally. I want to make clear, right up front, that what I'm saying is purely subjective and is not intended to serve as any sort of scientific argument or thesis. It's just a personal observation, which may resonate with some readers.
When I first started looking into paranormal phenomena back in 1997, I was very skeptical and wary of being drawn in too deeply or too fast. One area that I avoided looking at for quite a while was life after death. I couldn't conceive of how such a thing would be possible — where would the dead people go? — and I felt the whole subject was likely to be a waste of time.
Sometime around 1999 (I think), I was in a used book shop and saw a paperback copy of Raymond Moody's bestseller Life After Life. I reacted with disdain. Who would want to read that crap? Yes, I had read some of Rupert Sheldrake's books by then, and other books dealing with outré theories and strange phenomena, but this was a bridge too far. I wasn't going to buy it. But then I noticed that because the book was in very poor condition, it had been marked down to 50 cents.
Well, I figured, for 50 cents, why not give it a shot? It'll be good for a laugh anyway. So I bought it.
My point is, I was not predisposed to like this book.
Nor is the book terribly scientific in its approach. Later studies of NDEs — those by Kenneth Ring and Michael Sabom, for instance — made an effort to approach the subject in a methodical way. Life After Life, on the other hand, is basically a series of reports Moody elicited from his patients, in no particular order, with few details and no clear method.
Nevertheless, when I read the book, a peculiar and unexpected thing happened. I felt that it made sense to me. More than that, it felt real. It felt … familiar.
Actually, it felt as if I had known this all along, but somehow had forgotten it. Now Moody had reminded me, and I thought, "Well, of course. I should have remembered."
Sometime after reading the book, I recalled a rather odd feature of my early childhood, which was that I was chronically dissatisfied with the world. I felt irritated — exasperated, even — by things like litter and unkempt lawns and ramshackle buildings and rude people. I thought that everything should be perfect. In fact, I liked to imagine designing a theme park like Disneyland where everything would be immaculately maintained and the staff and visitors would be unfailingly cheerful and kind. I didn't care so much about the rides at this fanciful park of mine; what appealed to me was the idea of a community, a self-contained world, where everything was beautiful and clean and perfect and happy.
Life After Life brought back these childhood memories, and I wondered if maybe — just maybe – I had remembered, as a child, a perfect, beautiful environment that I had known before I was even born, and if my desire to recreate it was an attempt to get back to that better, cleaner, shinier, happier world.
Be that as it may, my response to Life After Life was that it was probably true. This response, I freely admit, was not based on any scientific evaluation of the book's contents. It was simply a gut feeling. This is the way it is — that's how I felt.
Naturally I was not intellectually satisfied with a mere feeling, so I dove into the literature of NDEs and quickly found that there were more rigorous studies available. But I wouldn't have pursued this interest in the first place if the book — the very idea — hadn't felt "right" to me.
I suspect that Life After Life became a surprise bestseller in part because other people, consciously or unconsciously, shared my response. It may be that this knowledge — nonverbal, nonrational — is part of us all, but is usually buried under the pressures, strains, and distractions of daily life, emerging only when someone reminds us of it. It's like a dream we've forgotten, until something comes along to jog our memory.
Our culture being what it is, we then feel the need to justify, explain, rationalize, defend, and prove our position, rather than simply accepting our feelings as valid indicators of a larger truth. And this is not altogether a bad thing, since a commitment to rational analysis may help us steer clear of chimerical notions and false leads.
Still, an intuitive sense that this is the way it is probably underlies a great deal of the fascination with the paranormal, and especially with life after death. And I don't think we should be too quick to dismiss such intuitions. Of course, they will never be convincing to other people who don't share them. But should that matter? Where is it written that our purpose in life is to get other people to agree with us? Shouldn't our purpose, instead, be to define our own truth, on our own terms, in a way that at least makes sense to us, even if to no one else?
As I said, this is unscientific, and I am not trying to prove anything here about the validity of NDEs or life after death. I simply want to raise the possibility that we may, perhaps, at times, experience a kind of "deep knowing" that goes deeper than scientific investigation, and which may never persuade anyone else, but can be immensely persuasive to us.
And perhaps we can benefit from honoring this kind of knowing, even if it isn't something that can be written up as a laboratory report, peer reviewed, and footnoted.