Raymond Moody

Moody holds a doctorate in philosophy and a medical degree. While teaching philosophy he began collecting accounts from people who had been close to death. Life After Life presented about 150 of them and identified elements that kept recurring, including a sense of peace, leaving the body, a tunnel, a being of light, a review of one's life, and a return.

The book was a collection of case reports and Moody said so. He did not claim to have proven survival of death, and he noted that no single account contained every element. Its importance was that it gave researchers a named phenomenon and a list of features to test. Kenneth Ring and Bruce Greyson then studied it with systematic methods.

Moody later wrote about shared-death experiences, in which people at the bedside of someone dying report taking part in the experience.^[2]

Critics pointed out that Moody's cases were self-selected and gathered informally, and that his composite description may have shaped how later experiencers told their stories. Researchers in the field accept the first point. The second is a concern for any method that compares accounts collected after 1975. See Convergent testimony as a method.

Moody's work is the starting point of the near-death literature that informed the framework. He has no connection to The Source of Aletheia and has not reviewed or endorsed Universal Panpsychism.

1. Moody, R. A. (1975). Life after life. Mockingbird Books.
2. Moody, R. A., & Perry, P. (2010). Glimpses of eternity: Sharing a loved one's passage from this life to the next. Guideposts.