Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife by Raymond Moody, MD, and Paul Perry (HarperOne, 2012)

I was asked by TLC Book Tours to review this book in my blog. Since I love anything on the subject of the paranormal, and have read Dr. Moody’s previous book, Life After Life, I jumped at the chance.

The book’s title is misleading as it is more about Dr. Moody’s life-long pursuit of proving that the near-death experience is a normal happening in the human existence vs. “paranormal.”

This is a memoir that begins with him explaining his fascination with the subject after being told of an uncle’s childhood dog that appeared to come back to life after being hit by truck, but later reappeared in the flesh.

His was a loving, close-knit family that encouraged his curiosity but was later disrupted when his father reappeared after being sent away to war. It’s his father’s reappearance that started his fight between his father’s world, with a surgeon’s mind of only logic and facts, vs. the exploration of the unseen and seemingly impossible.

Another important key in his quest was the loss of his beloved, nurturing grandfather, who later has a stroke and was unable to fully communicate or support his grandson as he once did.

How I differ in many of the reviewers on this tour, is I, like many of my blog readers, have a deep knowing that there is an afterlife. I don’t need to be convinced. I’ve had multiple visits from “spirits” throughout my life starting when I was very young, and the seemingly impossible is my norm, with each day and each exploration opening up the doorway of perception to what is real. I didn’t read this book as a skeptic, because I have this ability. So, instead, I read his life tale cheerleading him on that he indeed would find lots of proof of the afterlife he could document and share with the rest of the world, and he does, through his many scientific experiments.

His beginning experiments were met with enthusiasm, but the more he advanced in his career he ventured into more riskier or more “woo-woo” areas such as crystal-scrying, that led to using mirrors to meet with deceased loved ones, that  much of the medical community, especially his logic-bearing, rigid father concluded he had lost his mind. He had veered too out of the mainstream for them to accept.

Paramount to his struggle throughout his life, and what I thought was ironic, was that the medical community he worked with solely based their conclusions on logic, and not any form of true intuition or perception, therefore, they missed the crucial diagnosis he had of a dangerous thyroid illness that kept him ill most of his life!  But it was this same illness that allowed him to eventually have true, first-hand understanding of his life-long work into the near-death experience.

I enjoyed the book which held my interest. It is a little slow-going at first as I was anxious to jump right into his near-death work, but knowing his early beginnings contributed and helped me understand his overall story better.

Walking away from reading it, I did have the thought that his pursuit for later contact with passed loved ones was on the surface a desire to help those that are grieving, but maybe more of a personal desire to finally heal that personal wound of experiencing many loved ones in childhood who were there in physical body but unattainable/untouchable in spirit.

Thank you to Trish for allowing me to review this book. To continue on in the book tour and read what others have reviewed go to the master schedule here.