Raymond Moody

Raymond Moody (1944–present) is an American philosopher and psychiatrist whose 1975 bestseller Life After Life coined the term “near-death experience” (NDE) and brought the phenomenon to mass attention.

Collecting accounts from people resuscitated after cardiac arrest or close brushes with death, he identified a recurring pattern: a sense of leaving the body, moving through a tunnel toward light, encountering deceased relatives or a “being of light,” a life review, and profound peace, often followed by a transformed, less death-fearing outlook on life.

His work launched NDE studies as a recognized topic and seeded an entire genre of afterlife literature. Moody is a central figure in the survival strand and in mind-power’s broader claim that consciousness can function independent of the body, especially during clinical crisis.

The cross-cultural consistency of NDE reports is widely cited as evidence that mind is not simply brain. FLAG: the interpretation is contested. Skeptics argue NDEs are explicable by neurochemistry and physiology of the dying or oxygen-deprived brain (endorphins, anoxia, temporal-lobe activity, REM intrusion, expectation), and that the experiences, however real and transformative, do not establish survival of death.

Moody himself has often been careful about over-claiming. He is the genre’s originator; the phenomena are genuine experiences, their metaphysical meaning unresolved.