The Book of Immortality Read online

  Moody took to the stage. Bald, clean-shaven, and bright-eyed, he had the genial disposition of a doctor in his seventies. His natural charisma put the crowd at ease immediately. Not only did he come across as compassionate, learned, and generous, he also had that rare ability to simplify complicated matters. He clearly knew a great deal about his subject, and many others as well, but he kept reminding the audience of how little we can really know. “I am a great fan of science,” he said, “so I am in complete agreement with skeptics—these experiences don’t prove life after death. Reason as it is can’t tell us anything certain about the afterlife.” But the audience members, many of whom could be described as New Agers, wanted proof about immortality. What Moody had learned researching NDEs, however, is that nothing is straightforward when it comes to death.

  Born in rural Georgia and based in Choccolocco, Alabama, he spoke with a singsong, Southern twang, articulating every syllable, emphasizing key words such as su-per re-ali-teee, and ending them on a mild vibrato. He started discussing the impossibility of accurately conveying what transpires in NDEs. “In-de-scri-ba-bili-teee,” he pronounced, with that tremulous voice. “It’s something near-death experiences have in common the world over. An in-eff-a-bili-teee. The experiences are clear; but there are no words to explain what happened. It just can’t be properly described.”

  What also cannot be explained is the meaning of NDEs. Are they simply hallucinations? Or do they provide some insights into what occurs at death? Can they tell us anything about human prospects for immortality? Whatever the interpretation, one thing is certain: NDEs are a real phenomenon. According to the International Association for Near-Death Studies, between 4 percent and 15 percent of humans have had one. Many recount having a life review, seeing their whole life flash before their eyes. It isn’t uncommon to have out-of-body experiences: patients rise up and look down upon their own bodies in a dramatic transformation of perspective. In their detached aloofness, they may even hear the doctor pronouncing them dead. Conversely, they can be overwhelmed by white noise, a loud ringing or buzzing sound. Some feel that they have actually died; others feel fearlessness or unreality. It can be a peaceful, painless sensation—or a harrowing overdose of despair and guilt. Many come back unafraid of death.

  A travel narrative is frequently invoked. A barrier or threshold between our world and the beyond is crossed. We fly through the ceiling or into walls. We traverse a tunnel or narrow passageway. At the end is a light. Thought accelerates, space wrinkles, and we enter a see-through energy field. “At death a sort of portal opens up, a pathway,” Moody explained. “To what or where we don’t know.”

  Numerous accounts describe something scholars call the vestibule effect. It’s as though the front door to a mansion opens, and we find ourselves in the foyer of another dimension not subject to everyday laws. There’s a conjunction of opposites. Some compare it to being in a little room that’s big. The furniture comes toward us while moving away at the same time. We stand in place and simultaneously go forward. Our thoughts turn into people.

  Moody spoke of how the light may brighten in a room when someone dies. “I have seen people’s faces light up and transform as they pass on,” he said. “You might think this is crazy, but when my own mother died, I remember the shape of the room changed. There was a narrowing in the middle, a broadening at the top, as though in an hourglass. I saw a funnel above us.”

  He asked how many people in the audience had undergone an NDE. A smattering of hands went up. One woman near me described going through a tunnel as a child. Beings tried to pull her into the darkness. Right before crossing over into the light, something stopped her and explained it wasn’t her time yet. “How would you interpret that?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know.” Moody shook his head sincerely.

  A skeptical lady chimed in, “It was a bad dream, that’s all.”

  Seated in the back row of the room, I found myself lifting my hand with the other NDEers.

  * * *

  It happened to me as a teenager, in Hungary. I’d been playing soccer in a schoolyard next to home. A neighborhood kid brought a BB gun to the field. We all took turns firing it—unloaded, of course. Then we went to play a game. My team lost. Returning to the bench, I picked up the gun lying there. In mock-despondency at our defeat, I placed it in my mouth and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately, someone had loaded the chamber during the match and left it armed and unattended.

  The bullet tunneled through the length of my tongue, a fortuity that slowed it sufficiently to not actually perforate my spinal cord. The round steel pellet, flattened into a D shape by the resistance of its fleshly trajectory, came to rest inside the tissue around the cervical vertebrae behind my throat, mere millimeters from terminal damage.

  The moment the shot rang out, I hovered out into midair, two stories up, as though on wings. I looked down benevolently as a terrific volume of blood poured from my mouth. It felt like watching a dramatic reenactment, peering in on someone else’s traumatic accident. Decentered, disassociated, a part of me floated there, a kite in the breeze. Time stopped, or bent itself. For a spell, I dangled there languidly, taking everything in from an Archimedean vantage point. I could see the white, wooden goalposts, my sweater draped over the fence, an apricot tree, the hill sloping down to the shrubs that bordered our home. Minutes seemed to fly by—but the whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. In that warped temporality, I watched it all slowly for a fast instant, then leapt back into my usual point of view to see the crimson torrent gushing forth onto the field.

  It never hurt. The wound’s intensity must have overloaded my neuronal signals, short-circuiting any sensation of pain. Two friends took me to the hospital in a taxi. We weren’t sure where the bullet had ended up. The entry hole suggested it might be inside my tongue. X-rays revealed a white dot lodged in my esophagus. The doctor’s hands trembled as she picked up the forceps and attempted to disinter the pellet without pushing it deeper. She succeeded. After several days of observation, I went home. It never hurt. But it also didn’t convince me that death is—or is not—the end.

  * * *

  “Nobody can contradict you if you’ve had a near-death experience,” Moody explained to the crowd. “It cannot be challenged.” The experience is so powerful it can convince us that there is life after death, he continued, the same way some people find certainty through faith or religion. “But is there a rational way of answering the question of whether life continues after death? No, there isn’t.”

  “But in your work, you use the scientific method,” interjected a man in the crowd who seemed sure that NDEs offer proof of the afterlife.

  “No, I don’t,” Moody answered. “There’s no control group. Even in systematic parapsychological studies of NDEs, there’s no way of establishing any proof. But reason and conceptual analysis tell us there are other avenues for rational inquiry. Consider this premise: the only method we have of finding truth and establishing knowledge is science. It’s the premise of scientism. But how can we demonstrate whether that premise is true? Not through the scientific method. So reason tells us that we have to acknowledge that there are other ways of finding truth and establishing knowledge.”

  Moody spoke eloquently about how all the wonderful accomplishments of science make it so easy to slip into the belief system of scientism. “Scientism is a doctrine subscribed to by those who don’t know science. Really good scientists don’t worship science. They aren’t deh-vo-teees. They’re just as baffled by the world as the rest of us.”

  * * *

  During the break, I walked over to a table covered in books, CDs, and pamphlets on the far side of the banquet room. Photographs showed Marilyn Rossner: holding hands with Pope John Paul II, communing with the Dalai Lama, playing with children at Mother Teresa’s convent in Calcutta. I picked up a memoir written by her husband, John Rossner, an Anglican priest.1 The Priest and the Medium: Heaven Is Closer Than You Think! told the story of
their life and love. It described Marilyn as a diminutive, colorful whirlwind, a grown-up flower child in sundresses and pigtails. When they first met, in 1972, he actually thought she was a child, “a little doll-like character who just stepped out of a children’s illustrated story book.”

  The book chronicled the strange experiences they’d had together. They fraternized with Tibetan lamas, Jain acharyas, and Hindu mahasiddhas. They strolled over burning coals with swamis. They cured their cocker spaniel, Blackie, diagnosed with terminal leukemia, by praying over a fragment of fabric snipped from the stole of Saint Seraphim of Sarov. John wrote lovingly of the way Marilyn once restored twenty-twenty vision in a blind Native American girl by a laying on of the hands while channeling the Himalayan patron saint of the blind.

  Marilyn’s telepathic powers emerged in childhood. Teachers were aghast when she predicted a classmate’s death to the day. Asked how she’d known it would happen, she explained that she’d heard the date in her mind while noticing the swirling gray color surrounding the girl. Marilyn was surprised to learn that not everybody could see auras.

  She started wearing sunglasses to protect her eyes from the clouds of blue, pink, and green billowing out of people. Perhaps her strongest (or strangest) ability is seeing dead people in the moments just after they die, whether it be three children murdered in an icy snowdrift or her own grandmother. On the night her mother died, she sent John a fax from Spain: “Dear Dad,2 Please tell me what is going on there! I have just had a vision last night, of my mother. My mother said to me, ‘Marilyn, I have just died, but I am all right!’”

  According to one of the pamphlets on the table, Marilyn and her circle offered free supernormal-percipience services on Sunday evenings in the basement of the Days Inn in downtown Montreal. Each week, they gathered to channel the spiritual world and relay extraphysical messages. I folded the pamphlet into the copy of the book I purchased.

  * * *

  In Pew Trust surveys, 29 percent of Americans believe, based on personal experience, that it’s possible to contact the dead. Visionaries of all nations and all times have evoked immaterial beings, but the nineteenth century was the heyday for mediumship in the Western world. Psychics performed to packed houses. Séances were conducted in the White House. Spiritualism attracted millions of followers.

  The sheer scale of paranormal claims led to the formation of Britain’s Society for Psychical Research, established in 1882 to investigate the paranormal “in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems.” The society’s two founders, Henry Sidgwick and Frederic Myers, attempted to devise a means of demonstrating whether the soul can survive death. Alas, as Moody pointed out, studies concerning the hereafter remain outside the scientific method’s remit.

  Still, as a psychologist, Frederic Myers played a foundational role in exploring our understanding of the unconscious mind. He forwarded the by-now accepted idea of subliminal consciousness—which illuminated everything from hypnotic suggestion to dream imagery. But he also believed our subliminal self could contact beings that existed in a parallel realm he called the “metetherial world.” He coined the term telepathy as a way of referring to “the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another independently of the recognized channels of sense.” Myers’s final work, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, shows that he believed to the very end in the possibility of posthumous immortality. He exerted a profound influence on William James, whose famous 1898 lecture on human immortality argues that “we need only suppose the continuity of our consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional waves occasionally pouring over the dam.”

  James and Myers made a pact that whoever died first would communicate a sign—if at all possible—from beyond the grave. As Myers passed on in Rome, James sat outside Myers’s room with “his note-book on his knees, pen in hand, ready to take down the message with his usual methodical exactitude.” None came.

  When James’s turn came, he wasn’t as uncooperative—at least in John Rossner’s account. At one public séance Rossner attended, in which the host medium went into a trance and passed out, a semitransparent entity walked onto the stage and identified itself as the materialized spirit of William James.

  James’s ghost walked around the room and then plunged his hand into the solar plexus of a young man seated beside John Rossner, who looked on in amazement. “Professor James’s spirit hand progressively disappeared up past the wrist as he pushed it into my friend’s midriff until it was gone from sight. In a few seconds he began to draw it out again and in it was a white, cloudy, luminous substance which came at first in a lump, but still attached to my friend somehow.” Because of the ectoplasm’s volatility, James kept making a patty-cake motion with his hands to help the energy stay in place, as though using a spoon to prevent a poaching egg from disintegrating into wisps.

  Then something went wrong. James started quivering. He asked for the lights to be dimmed. Being in this dimension for so long was weakening him, he said, and the vibrations from one particular red light were messing with his ability to stay materialized. The wattage was also eating away at the eight feet of ectoplasmic goo seeping from Rossner’s friend’s aural field all over the floor.

  A momentary panic struck when it became apparent that nobody knew where the switch was—except the medium, who, as Professor James’s conduit, lay comatose. Nobody wanted to flip the wrong switch and turn the fluorescent lights on, pulverizing all the fragile ectoplasm everywhere. But then John realized he could cover the bulb with his cupped hands if he stood upon a chair. Crisis averted, the spectral professor crammed the misty pillar of etheric energy back into the volunteer and then took a bow. “Finally he began to disappear in full view of all,” explained Rossner’s book. “First his feet and legs, then with the usual characteristic poof of the dematerialization process the rest of him was gone.”

  Part of the beauty of this subject, I was starting to realize, is the way our desire for immortality manifests itself in the most exceptional stories.

  * * *

  The remainder of Raymond Moody’s presentation concerned his rediscovery of a twenty-five-hundred-year-old technology that he claimed allows people to see and speak with departed loved ones. He himself had seen it work on numerous occasions. All one needs to do, he said, is construct a simple apparatus using materials already available in most homes.

  “You can set up the apparition chamber in a walk-in closet,” he explained. Any small, windowless room is fine. Fabric needs to be placed over the entryway so no cracks of light bleed through. The next step is finding a mirror. “The dimensions are irrelevant,” Moody said. “Four feet by four feet is what I use. Position it just above head level so you don’t see yourself, or anything else in the reflection. Once the room is in complete darkness, fetch a candle or a very dim light. Enough to make out the mirror a little bit. Because nothing is reflected in the mirror’s surface, the effect is akin to gazing into infinity. Just look into the space with no agenda. It’s like you are in outer space, seeing the depth of the infinite.”

  He’d been inspired to explore the lost art of crystallomancy, a form of scrying also known as mirror gazing, based on his research into the Pawnee Indian tradition of sacrificing badgers. After draining the badger’s blood into a bowl, they’d see mirror visions in the blood’s reflective surface. This practice synced up with discoveries made at archaeological digs of ancient Greek psychomanteums. Some scholars feel that these sanctuaries, also known as “oracles of the dead,” were places where the spirits of the dead could be called upon. Based on his own exegeses of papyrus scrolls, Moody decided that the bronze cauldrons found in the torch-lit Greek apparition hallways used to be filled with olive oil, creating a mirrorlike screen upon which to commune with shades.

  In 1990, Moody opened a psychomanteum research laboratory in a rural Alabama gristmill. He named it the John Dee Memorial Theater of the Mind, in honor
of Queen Elizabeth I’s official scryer. The chamber itself is covered in floor-to-ceiling curtains of black velvet suspended by a framework of plastic tubing painted black. Fifty percent of those who’ve mirror-gazed at his facilities, he said, get a visitation from a dead relative. “You seem to see loved ones there in the mirror,” he said. “You see full-color images as though in a screen. They may stay in the Middle Realm, that in-between space. Or they sometimes come out of the mirror and stand in front of you. Or you yourself go through the mirror and meet your relatives on the other side.”

  The notion of darkened mirrors as portals to the otherworld had such widespread appeal in classical times that Pythagoras cautioned against looking in mirrors next to lamps. Leaving Moody’s lecture, I decided to heed Pythagoras’s warning. But I also resolved to check out one of Marilyn Rossner’s message circles. Perhaps a spirit—or at the very least Rossner’s belief in them—would shed more light on the meaning of spiritual immortality. Maybe I’d even hear from Auntie Tiny.

  * * *

  Montreal boasts many places of worship in unlikely settings: charismatic churches in movie theaters, Orthodox synagogues in former breakfast restaurants, Hindu temples in repurposed auto body shops. None are quite as site-nonspecific as the midsize conference hall in the basement of the downtown Days Inn,3 Sunday-evening gathering place for the Spiritual Science Fellowship.

  When I arrived, just in time for the 7:30 p.m. liturgy, a forty-person-strong congregation had already assembled. For some reason, I’d expected a celebratory mood, but most attendees sat solemnly. The five clairvoyants onstage guided us through a meditation. We were asked to clap arrhythmically, possibly to scare maleficent entities away, or perhaps to heighten the shamanistic vibe. The mediums placed themselves in an unfocused state of mind, the better to let the spirit world in.