Moody, Raymond Avery, Jr. (1944-)

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Moody, Raymond Avery, Jr. (1944-)

Raymond A. Moody, whose 1975 book Life After Life helped launch a new generation of research on life after death, was born on June 30, 1944 in Porterdale, Georgia. He attended the University of Virginia where he successively earned his B.A. (1966), M.A. (1967), and Ph.D. (1969) in philosophy. While pursuing his education, in 1966 he married Louise Lambach. He joined the faculty at East Carolina University in 1969. He left his university post in 1972 to pursue a degree in medicine (his father was a physician), which he completed at Medical College of Georgia in 1976. He completed his residency in psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical Center.

While completing his medical degree, Moody began to collect accounts of people who had either died and come back to life or come close to dying, what he termed near-death experiences. These accounts became the basis of a best-selling book, Life after Life (1975), and along with the work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, provided the foundation for a generation of research on survival of death and a new starting point for people engaged in counseling the dying. While accounts of the neardeath experience had been collected for centuries and had become the subject of attention by psychical research, they were virtually unknown to parapsychologists who had largely abandoned research of life-after-death in favor of laboratory research on basic ESP experiences.

The success of Moody's first book freed him to continue his research on near-death experiences and he wrote a best-selling sequel, Reflections on Life after Life, released in 1977. He traveled widely through the 1980s, teaching and lecturing on his work. During the 1990s, his research has taken on a new focus toward those who have lost a loved one. In this regard, he has explored the idea of evoking apparitions of the deceased as a means of resolving unfinished issues in a relationship otherwise ended by the death of one party. To this end he constructed what is known as a psychomanteum, a room especially designed to produce a favorable alteration of consciousness and facilitate the production of apparitions. This work became the subject of his latest book, Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones (1994).

The psychomanteum was constructed at Moody's private research center, the John Dee Memorial Theater of the Mind, named for the Elizabethan magician. Here he not only counsels people on concerns about death, but carries on a program of research and education, including periodical conferences for professionals. Both his philosophical training and his research have provided Moody with material for his mature reflections on the afterlife which have appeared in his two books, Coming Back: A Psychiatrist Explores Past Life Journeys (1991) and The Last Laugh (1998).

The Theater of the Mind is located in rural Alabama and may be contacted at P. O. Box 1882, Anniston, AL 36202. Moody has a website at http://www.lifeafterlife.com.