The philosopher Paul Kurtz has written that Moody's evidence for the NDE is based on personal interviews and anecdotal accounts and there has been no statistical analysis of his data. Terence Hines commented "such reports are hardly sufficient to argue for the reality of an afterlife." His methods have drawn criticism from the scientific community as many of the personal reports he collected on NDEs were given by the patients themselves, months and even years after the event. Moody has been described as a "strong personal believer" in the paranormal. The psychologist James Alcock has noted that Moody ".appears to ignore a great deal of the scientific literature dealing with hallucinatory experiences in general, just as he quickly glosses over the very real limitations of his research method." Criticism of Moody's near-death research īarry Beyerstein, a professor of psychology, has written that Moody's alleged evidence for an afterlife is flawed, both logically and empirically. Moody has also researched past life regression and believes that he personally has had nine past lives. By staring into a mirror in a dimly lit room, Moody claims that people are able to summon visions of spiritual apparitions (see mirror gazing). Inspired by the Greek psychomanteums where the ancient Greeks would go to consult the apparitions of the dead (which Moody had read about in classic Greek texts that he encountered while a student at the University of Virginia), Moody built a psychomanteum in Alabama, which he calls the Dr. As a matter of fact, I must confess to you in all honesty, I have absolutely no doubt, on the basis of what my patients have told me, that they did get a glimpse of the beyond.
I don't mind saying that after talking with over a thousand people who have had these experiences, and having experienced many times some of the really baffling and unusual features of these experiences, it has given me great confidence that there is a life after death. In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove, Moody shared his personal conclusions about his research into near-death experiences: In 1975, Moody published many of these experiences in his book, Life After Life, in which he coined the term "near-death experience." Moody began documenting similar accounts by other people who had experienced clinical death and discovered that many of these experienced shared common features, such as the feeling of being out of one’s body, the sensation of traveling through a tunnel, encountering dead relatives, and encountering a bright light. George Ritchie, who told Moody about an incident in which he believed he had journeyed into the afterlife while dead for nearly nine minutes at the age of 20 (which Ritchie would later recount in his book, Return From Tomorrow, published in 1978). While an undergraduate at the University of Virginia in 1965, Moody encountered psychiatrist, Dr. In 1998, Moody was appointed Chair in Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Career Early career Īfter obtaining his M.D., Moody worked as a forensic psychiatrist in a maximum-security Georgia state hospital. He also obtained a PhD in psychology from the University of West Georgia, then known as West Georgia College, where he later became a professor in the topic. (1967) and a PhD (1969) in philosophy from the University of Virginia. Moody was born in Porterdale, Georgia, the son of an agnostic surgeon. 3 Criticism of Moody's near-death research.