Рэймонд Муди: Исследования околосмертных переживаний и сознания.

American psychologist and philosopher
the philosopher

Raymond A. Moody Jr. (born June 30, 1944) is an American philosopher, psychiatrist, physician and author, most widely known for his books about afterlife and near death experiences (NDE), a term that he coined in 1975 in his best selling book Life After Life. His research explores personal accounts of subjective phenomena encountered in near death experiences, particularly those of people who have apparently died but been resuscitated. He has widely published his views on what he terms near death experience psychology.

Moody was born in Porterdale, Georgia, the son of an agnostic surgeon. In 1976, he received an M. D. from the Medical College of Georgia.

After obtaining his M. D., Moody worked as a forensic psychiatrist in a maximum security Georgia state hospital. In 1998, Moody was appointed chair in Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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. John Dee Theater of the Mind. 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). Moody has also researched past life regression and believes that he personally has had nine past lives.

Barry Beyerstein, a professor of psychology, has written that Moody's alleged evidence for an afterlife is flawed, both logically and empirically. 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." Moody has been described as a "strong personal believer" in the paranormal. 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. Terence Hines commented "such reports are hardly sufficient to argue for the reality of an afterlife." 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. There also is the question of interpreting such data as has been published assuming that the factual matter is objectively correct; according to Kurtz, "there is no reliable evidence that people who report such experiences have died and returned, or that consciousness exists separate from the brain or body." The philosopher Robert Todd Carroll has written that a characteristic of Moody's work is the omission of cases that do not fit his hypothesis, confirming the aspect of cherry picking. Carroll writes that what Moody describes as a typical NDE may be due to brain states triggered by cardiac arrest and anesthesia. Moody believes NDEs are evidence for an afterlife but Carroll states they can be explained by neurochemistry and are the result of a "dying, demented or drugged brain."

Moody claims to have had a near death experience in 1991 when he attempted suicide (which he talks about in this book Paranormal) which he says was the result of an undiagnosed thyroid condition which affected his mental state. In an interview in 1993, Moody stated he was placed in a mental hospital by his family for his work with mirror gazing.