Near-death experience (NDE) expert, Raymond Moody, joined George Knapp to discuss shared death experiences - deathbed moments when entire families see the light, the room changes shape, or everyone is witness to a film-like review of a loved one's life, giving us a new understanding of the journey that we potentially will take at the end of our lives. He spoke about one of the first and most noteworthy NDE cases, that of Dr. George Ritchie, who in 1943, died from pneumonia. After he was revived, he described experiencing a panoramic life review with a being of complete love and compassion, as well as seeing into other realms of existence. Interestingly, during life reviews, the focus is often on little remembered moments, and spontaneous acts of kindness rather than major accomplishments, Moody detailed.
He pointed out that shared death experiences refute the idea that NDE phenomena such as the tunnel of light are hallucinatory effects of an oxygen deprived brain, as bystanders and relatives are generally in good health. Shared death experiences are actually more profound than NDEs, he said, noting that witnesses sometimes see a transparent replica or a globular light that rises up out of the body at the moment of death.
Moody related his own experience when his mother was in the process of dying-- "The room changed configuration; we were no longer in a three-dimensional space...it was kind of like you were in the apex of a funnel or double funnel, kind of a like an hourglass. The room seemed to pinch up in the middle." It was not a dream state, and was more real than our ordinary waking consciousness, he added.