I’ve never had a near-death experience and don’t know anyone who has, but according to a poll that’s quoted throughout the NDE literature, at least 5 percent of Americans have returned from one and told the tale. That may be a small percentage, but it’s a lot of people—given today’s population, over 15,000,000. Other estimates are lower, but they’re still huge. And most of these people seem to be writing books.
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Near-death experiences became a subject of wide-ranging public discussion and dispute in 1975, when a doctor named Raymond Moody Jr. published Life After Life—a book that in the subsequent literature on the phenomenon more or less holds the place of the Bible, its authority constantly cited and Moody’s imprimatur constantly sought. Its hold on the reading public is also remarkable: 13,000,000 copies have been sold. But when we consider its sensational effect, the book itself is painstakingly unsensational. It’s a circumspect report on what the young doctor had been hearing from some of his patients—and then from others whom he sought out, more than a thousand in all—about experiences they had when near death. In fact, it was Moody who coined the phrase “near-death experience.”
What his book did was validate the subject. As he wrote in a recent memoir, Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife, “People no longer had to keep it in the closet or worry about people thinking they were crazy. It gave us legitimate consolation.” But in a revised edition of his Life After Life published in 2001, he writes:
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Sadly, the avalanche of books on the subject includes many that, to my personal knowledge, have been fabricated by unscrupulous self-promoters cynically seeking notoriety or financial gain rather than true advancement in knowledge.
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If Raymond Moody is the godfather of the near-death movement, the godmother—or grandmother—was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who demands attention because of On Death and Dying (1969), her influential book on the five stages of grief. In a later book, On Life After Death, she turns to more speculative matters, speaking with absolute (and unsupported) authority: “What the church tells little children about guardian angels is based on fact. There is proof that every human being, from his birth until his death, is guided by a spirit entity.” Among her other pronouncements: “it is a blessing to have cancer” and “a minimum of 30 percent of our population” have been sexually abused in their childhood.
To Heaven and Back! by Robert Gottlieb | The New York Review of Books
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