Moody, Raymond A.

Parapsychologist Raymond Moody (1944– ) has written extensively about near-death experiences, and some people credit him with being the first to use the phrase, which appeared in his 1975 best-selling book, Life After Life.

This book, which presents more than one hundred case studies of people who experienced clinical death and were then revived, identifies several common aspects of near-death experiences, including a feeling of peace, an out-of-body experience, the perception of movement through a long tunnel with a bright light at the end, and an encounter with dead relatives or other beings believed to be in the afterlife. A 1989 sequel to Life After Life, The Light Beyond, presents near-death cases gathered over ten more years.

In this work, Moody estimates that 8 million people have had near-death experiences. In another work, Coming Back (1991), Moody turns his attention to what he calls “life before life,” also known as past lives. In this work, Moody discusses a two-year study aimed at uncovering possible proof of reincarnation. Moody admits to being a skeptic about past lives before he himself was hypnotized and discovered that he had lived nine previous existences.