Moody about Moody

Death is a transition into another world 

Raymond Moody

Raymond Moody’s words disturbed the old man a lot. Death is not the end that he hoped it to be. He learned from an early age that life is suffering and the idea, if not the goal, was to end such suffering. He learned it from his mother when she took him there to the Pitt Street temple in Penang. That was sometime in the mid 60s.

Clinging onto his mother’s hand in case he lost her amongst the throngs of buddhists, he was overwhelmed by the crowd and by the smoke in his eyes. Then, he was a little boy of no more than six years of age. The lad asked his mother who she was praying to. Looking somewhat befuddled and somewhat annoyed at the distraction his question posed to her, the woman in her mid-forties simply dragged the lad outside, away from the crowded room that was on the verge of being subsumed by grey smoke from the joss.

The lad pulled at his mother’s hand like he was pulling at the rope of a church bell.

“Ahma, who were we praying to?” he asked again.

“What did you pray for?” he persisted in getting his questions answered, as he kept pulling seemingly at the rope of the church bell that would not toll.

She is already so caring and loving to me. My clothes smell clean and are always well-ironed. My school shoes are white with snow white powder. She scrubs and bathes me so diligently every day my body lacks a single dead skin cell. She walks me to school, rain or shine. She is the gentlest person to me. Pus from my wounds are carefully teased out and iodine applied until the scabs form. What else do I need that she has to pray for me? The lad asked himself.

Wearing a copper-brown cheongsam, his mother looked a lot different from most of the devotees in the temple. Her permed hair, fair complexion and prim demeanour painted her as middle-class. She wasn’t quite plump but she was far from being scrawny and haggard. The temple was the one place where she never haggled for a better price. She just paid whatever the going rate was for a bunch of joss sticks, hell money or a prayer. Her pouted lips were a good indicator of her mood. The more pronounced her lips pouted, the crankier she would be.

“I pray to our ancestors,” she said without pouting her lips.

“Our dead ancestors in China?” the lad asked.

They didn’t even know us. Why should they help us? Besides, they are all dead so how can they help us? The lad had many questions but no one to ask. His mother was already on her way to ask Busak (in her Ningbo dialect) about their future. Busak turned out to be Buddha. But, her favourite deity was Guanyin. Back then, the lad thought Guanyin was a female, the Chinese goddess of mercy. All-seeing and all-hearing, she was the one worshippers called upon in times of despair and fear. The lad would grow up, ignorant of the fact that Guanyin was an Indian man from over two thousand years ago who people transformed into a feminine form. The transgender movement perhaps started then.

So, when the old man learned from Dr Moody that death was just a transition to another world, he sat at his desk, aghast at the truth he had just stumbled upon. Ahma was right after all! Our ancestors may be dead but they are still very much alive in another world! Ahma wasn’t silly at all to pray to them for providence or prosperity.

In 1975, Dr Moody interviewed over a hundred and fifty people who were clinically dead but came back from their “near death experience”. They all shared the same experience – death was not the end. They could see their loved ones and medical workers below them when they ascended from their body. Calm, detached from their physical body, they felt warm and alive. Almost everyone described a tunnel of bright light radiating warmth, love and peace. They met “beings”, some they recognised, others unknown but all were kind and welcoming. In the light, the one common experience was reliving one’s life, not as how one saw it but as how others did. Each of them felt the raw experience and unfiltered impact they caused their friends and loved ones. But they weren’t being judged. It was a process of being informed of what they did. Every single person described wholesome, indescribable love and unconditional acceptance. They were then told, “This is not your time,” and so, they returned back to their body.

It seemed clear that our consciousness isn’t tied to our brain – it exists beyond it. Dr Moody’s observations challenged science, religion and humanity itself. He concluded that we are more than just our body. Death is not the end. Critics, of course, were outraged by his findings. They called it pseudoscience, attributed it to effects of the medication those people were on or a deprivation of oxygen to the brain.

Death is not the end.

“How awful,” the old man said to his shadow self.

Life is suffering, Buddha was certain about this fact. If death is not the end, then there is no end to suffering, the old man decided.

“How awful,” he repeated.

Death is not the end. So, the cultists who caused mass suicides so their followers could rush to heaven and the religious martyrs who self-destructed with explosives to enjoy 72 virgins and own 80,000 servants in heaven in the name of their cause were probably all correct.

Death is a transition into another world. Jesus proved it over two thousand years ago. God sacrificed His only son to save the rest of us but thankfully, it was a sacrifice of the utmost brevity. His crucifixion, although tortuous and agonisingly painful, thankfully lasted “only” about six hours. Just three days later, Jesus was resurrected. He would have known his sacrifice was fleetingly temporary since resurrection was a process that could be relied upon.

“In catechism class, I learned Jesus now resides in heaven,” the old man told his shadow self. That was in 1965. Life goes on. Death does not end life. Suffering is eternal. Oh dear. Oh no.