New York, Atria, 2023. ISBN: 978-1-58270-885-0. Paperback 212 pp.

Almost fifty years ago Raymond Moody gave the world the term ‘Near-Death Experience’ and the rest, as they say, is history. As the cover of the first paperback edition of Life After Life – the book in which the term first appeared – proudly proclaimed, in exploring the odd and seemingly anomalous phenomenon to which he first gave a name Moody was presenting ‘[a]ctual case histories that reveal there is life after death.’ Or so the publishers at Bantam Books claimed, anyway: although Moody himself didn’t go quite that far. At least, not then.

Fast forward fifty years and things have changed somewhat. In Proof of Life after Life he sails closer to the wind, declaring in almost the book’s very last words that ‘I am confident of a life after death’ and in the 212 pages between this and the start of the book we learn that it is research into shared Near-Death Experiences – the focus of this, his latest book – that has given him this confidence.

Like Life After Life, this latest offering by Raymond Moody and co-authored with Paul Perry is in no sense an ‘academic read.’ But the ‘sophisticated-folksy’ tone he adopts when he writes of weighty topics such as death and the possibility that we may survive it has always been part of Moody’s appeal and he deploys it in this, his latest book, too, where instead of dealing with Near-Death Experiences per se he deals with a related set of phenomena he dubs ‘Shared Death Experiences’: events which are, in his words, ‘occurrences where a person who is alive and well shares the death experience of a person who is dying.’

For Moody, Shared Death Experiences (SDEs) go one better than Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). For whilst NDEs, he writes, ‘are subjective events, without objective proof’ SDEs promise to take us beyond such subjectivity, offering ‘the missing link of objectivity’ that may allow us, at last, to talk of these apparent return-from-death stories as proof of life after death. Proof of Life after Life is Moody’s attempt to present the evidence for this ‘missing link’: which he does throughout the main body of the work.

Aside from one new-ish aspect of end-of-life phenomena – to which we will return shortly – there’s nothing terribly new or groundbreaking here. Indeed, regular readers of Moody’s output since Life After Life will be familiar with just about everything: from the ‘crisis apparition’ material presented in chapter three via chapter four’s discussion of transformative effects produced by NDEs right through to his 1990s psychomanteum research which is presented – and updated – in the penultimate chapter. Throughout, Moody is keen to stress the allegedly objective value of each ‘sub-category’ of SDE. So, for example, in being able to perceive the way or ways a Near-Death Experience transforms an experiencer we are, according to Moody, being afforded an objective ‘peek’ into the nature and actuality of the experience itself. Such changes, he claims – such as those involving allegedly changed personality, new gifts, and enhanced spirituality – are ‘widely visible’ and therefore in some sense shared: hence providing greater evidential value for the reality and true meaning of Near-Death Experiences than if such experiences were to remain the purely subjective ‘possessions’ of experients alone. This is a line of argument he sticks with throughout the book and it seems to have ‘tipped the balance’ somewhat for him. Hence, as already noted, by the study’s conclusion he finally declares himself ‘confident’ of life after death: clear movement from his more cautious position of almost fifty years earlier when he single-handedly ushered in the dawn of near-death studies.

Does the evidence he presents really justify such a shift? Of course, it very much depends on what value you place on anecdote together with the quality and veracity of the anecdotes presented in this study. Almost at the very end Moody avers that ‘[A]t its essence, [near-]death studies is the study of stories’ and its hard to disagree. In fact, the whole book is pretty much anecdote driven: including the chapter in which accurate (and confirmed) out-of-body observations taken from experients’ claims are taken as objective proof that at death there is a separation of soul and body. I found myself waiting, here, for an admission from Moody that the numerous attempts to hide objects in operating theatres in an attempt to provide veridical proof of such separation had all failed: but I waited in vain. This being said, however, eyewitness testimony is accepted as having high evidential value in a wide range of contexts: so why not in the field of near-death studies as well?

The chapter that offers the most up-to-date research is the one dealing with terminal lucidity: that is, with those cases where persons who have previously exhibited significant degrees of cognitive impairment become temporarily lucid just before dying. These cases have snagged the attention of some near-death researchers for obvious reasons; suggesting, as they do, the possibility that mental states may not be dependent on underlying brain states and giving a new ‘angle’ on the temporarily enhanced cognitive ‘lucidity’ reported by some Near-Death Experiencers during their experiences. I should have liked to have known more about some of the ‘evidence’ presented here and this reinforced, for me, the need for further studies of Terminal Lucidity which rest on better documented cases than some of the ones that the authors include in this chapter. This being said, the book overall includes some fascinating material and anybody keen to find out what they’ve been missing within the last half century of near-death studies – and within Moody’s NDE odyssey in particular – could do worse than to start here.

This review first appeared in Psychical Studies, Winter 2024/Spring 2025, Issue No 104, pp. 26 – 9