Life after Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon–Survival of Bodily… (1979)

Life After Life is written by a medical doctor who recounts experiences of numerous patients who report remarkably similar experiences with near death experiences.Dr. Moody writes in an unbiased way as scientific as possible given the topic. He concludes the book by saying he has no proof or conclusions--only more questions.

If you've ever wanted to read first-hand accounts of near death experiences this is the book to read.

As the author says, there are no answers--only more questions. But the stories are beautifully recalled by the patients and it does give one hope for a hereafter. ( )

A collection of the experiences of men and women who have communicated
with the dead using the easy-to-learn techniques developed by

I was impressed with the book until his afterword, which he wrote in 2000, where he claims that he can safely help people cross to the other side and back. Maybe I need to look more into it, but it just sounds like another Sylvia Brown and the like. ( )

I have recently reread this book which was published 32 years ago. In my 20's, I took a college course on Death with Buzz O'Connell in Houston, Texas. He also taught a course on humor, but told us there was more humor and laughter in the death course. Somehow when a joke is studied, it loses its laugh. On the other hand, laughing is one way to deal with our uncomfortable feelings about our death.

In the 1970's, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., who wrote the foreword to this book, was quite the rage as she delineated the stages a person goes through in facing death. Dr. Moody's book reviews 150 cases of people with near-death experiences (died and were resuscitated) to give us the stages after death as reported in these cases.

What is remarkable is that the stages he discovered parallel much writings on meditation, which is often referred to as dying while living. As a person who is very familiar with much writing on meditation, it was easy for me to see the parallels as I read his section on "The Experience of Dying."

In his section on "Parallels," he did not really discuss the practices of Eastern meditation or even of Jewish or Christian meditation, but he did a good job of the writings of Plato, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Emanuel Swedenborg. I had read The Book of the Dead and knew about Plato, but was interested in the details provided by Dr. Moody. Swedenborg was new to me.

I enjoyed rereading the book as my knowledge of meditation is much richer today. Anyone involved in meditation will see immediately the value of this work. I wonder what Dr. Moody is doing today. ( )