"Paranormal" by Raymond Moody

[Zadius Sky]

From Amazon:

From the bestselling author of Life After Life and pioneer researcher and leading authority on near-death experiences comes Paranormal, an intimate look at a lifetime spent fearlessly wrestling with humankind's most important and perplexing question: What happens when we die?

Paranormal begins with a harrowing account of Moody's suicide attempt—due to an undiagnosed illness that led him into depression—and proceeds to explore his lifelong fascination with life beyond our bodies. Moody traces the roots of his obsession with the point of death and how, at age twenty-three, he launched the entirely new medical field of near-death studies. He went on to explore the world of past lives and possible reincarnation before stumbling into the fascinating realm of facilitated visions. Moody's rural research center, Theater of the Mind, dramatically advances paranormal research by melding ancient and modern techniques to arouse many of the transformative elements of the near-death experience in people who are still living.

After more than four decades of studying death and the possibility of an afterlife, Moody still sees endless promise in the fringes of psychological sciences, where he continues to seek answers to what happens to our souls after death.

I had just finished reading Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife by Raymond Moody and Paul Perry, and it was an interesting read.

I am one of those types who enjoy reading autobiographies and learning from others through their lives, and this book is basically an autobiography of Dr. Moody and his journey into the "paranormal." Personally, I have never had a chance to read his Life After Life and whenever I passed by this title in a bookstore, I had avoid it due to its high mass market distribution and how it was sold million copies (it was one of those things that I used to avoid - I tend to go against the popularity). But, after reading this latest book, I just might as well go ahead and pick it up.

Paranormal is about Dr. Moody's journey into the paranormal field, starting from near-death experiences, past lives, psychomanteum, and shared-death experiences as well as his own personal life and his life-long struggle with myxedema. In the early 1990s, he tried to kill himself (due to myxedema madness) and ended up having his first near-death experience. Dr. Moody appeared to be heavily influenced by ancient Greek literature, especially Plato's works, to which he became a philosopher (his first doctorate was in philosophy) and he became deeply fascinated with the subject of life after death to what philosophy is all about. He has taken a stance on being a skeptic, in an ancient Greek sense of the word, as being the one who neither believes nor disbelieves but who keeps searching for truth (rather than a "naysayer").

There is an interesting piece, to me, on the interaction between Moody and Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (author of On Death and Dying to which I have read back in college over 10 years ago) where she was becoming insistent that his work has "proved" that there is life after death while Moody said "If you believe in life after death, then none of this research is necessary, but if you want to prove life after death, then our research has only begun" (118). She simply didn't agree.

The book goes further on with Dr. Moody's experiments with the psychomanteum in his country home, which he has named "Theater of the Mind." Eventually, when his own father found out about the experiment with the psychomanteum in the early 90's, he had committed his own son to an institution (even though it was a short stay).

I've found this book to be an interesting and easy read (250 pages), but I felt an impression as if there is a great deal of detail being left out in a few areas in this book.