Life After Life

Life After Life is the founding document of near-death-experience research, the work in which Raymond Moody coined the term "near-death experience" and brought the phenomenon to mass attention. Its central claim is that people who are resuscitated after cardiac arrest or other brushes with death frequently report a coherent, recurring experience, one suggestive to many readers that consciousness may continue to function when the body is in crisis.

The argument rests on the comparison of numerous first-hand accounts, from which Moody distils a recurring sequence: a sense of leaving the body, passage through a tunnel toward light, an encounter with deceased relatives or a luminous presence, a panoramic review of one's life, and a pervasive peace, often followed by a lasting reduction in the fear of death. The cross-cultural consistency of these reports is offered as the phenomenon's most striking feature.

Within the survival tradition the book is the genre's origin point, seeding decades of afterlife literature and clinical study. Its interpretation remains contested: skeptics attribute the pattern to the neurochemistry and physiology of the dying brain, and the experiences, however real and transformative, are not generally accepted as establishing survival of death.