Raymond A. Moody coined the term 'Near-Death Experience' in 1975 to describe reports from people in states close to death. A closer look at the history of ideas in the early 1970s reveals that Moody's concept drew on diverse streams: religious experiences in boundary situations, mystical, extrasensory, and psychedelic drug experiences. The article argues that the discourse popularized by Moody's work is fundamentally a discourse about the possibility and reality of religious experience amid the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Moody's thesis of a broadly uniform near-death experience was received as evidence for the resilience of religious experiences in late modernity.
Since R.A. Moody first described near-death experiences (NDE) in 1975, medicine and natural science have predominantly interpreted the various perceptions during NDE as complex hallucinations with physiological causes, such as endogenous hallucinogens like DMT or oxygen deficiency. However, critical analysis of these and other neurobiological explanatory models shows that the phenomena of NDE cannot be adequately explained within the prevailing reductionist-materialistic worldview. The article contends that a purely materialistic point of view is insufficient to account for the whole phenomenon of NDE.
This chapter examines the entanglements between religion, psychology, and psychiatry in contemporary religious landscapes by introducing the school of Transpersonal Psychology (TP) and the work of psychiatrist and LSD researcher Stanislav Grof. It focuses on psychological approaches to Near-Death Experiences (NDE) and how they produce religious imaginary. The chapter argues that the boundaries between science and religion are fluid, as demonstrated by scholarly approaches to NDE within TP.