Review of Dr. Moody's retreat
at the New Millennium Institute
Held Easter Week, March 31 - April 5,1996
Spending time with this man is like sitting in a room with a mirror into your soul, watching the mysteries of the cosmos reflect back at you.
Dr. Moody is the absolute epitome of the phrase a scholar and a gentleman. He is very modest about his accomplishments, having obtained by the age of 30 both a doctorate in philosophy and in medicine.
It is easy to imagine him feeling at home roaming the streets of Athens, deep in ponderous conversations with the greats -- philosophers Socrates and Plato, poet Homer, Herodotus, writer of the oracle of the dead, and Strabo,the geographer.
He honors them by carrying on the tradition of serious pursuit into life's mysteries and paradoxes. Moody considers himself to be a true skeptic, a logician who, unlike others with as much credibility, is not afraid to explore and test the paranormal to its limits.
It is not surprising that he has been singled out by the Christian Right as one of their favorite whipping boys. He is frayed by their insults. "They are easy to dismiss and highly annoying, but it really is high time to fight back against such illogical and ever-present dogma," says Moody.
The plethora of research he has become best known for, that of the near-death experience, only scratches the surface. It was clear that Moody has outgrow his interest in NDEs after spending over 20 years with the material, and we were allowed to progress with him as he unfolded more recent fascinations.
"The scientific paradigm states that in order for any phenomenon to meet with acceptance, experimental results must be reproducible," he explained. Since it is impossible to reproduce NDEs this led Moody to consider whether parts of the near-death experience could in fact, be reproduced.
Research into the practices of the ancient Greeks revealed that for over 1,000 years such places known as psychomanteums, underground clay houses interconnected by tunnels, existed for the specific purposed of evoking visitations from deceased loved ones. The best documented is the phychomanteum in the city of Ephyra in Epirus, described in Moody's book "Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones," co-authored with Paul Perry.
After this knowledge was revealed, there was no keeping our group from constructing its own psychomanteum. With the help of Raymond's delightful wife Cheryl we erected a sound-proof, dark chamber where we hung a mirror on the wall positioned above the head for gazing and placed a soft, dim light on the floor just behind a reclining chair. Before entering the psychomanteum, each participant spent the day in conversation with a partner recalling memories of the deceased loved one with whom the encounter was sought.
Our make-shift psychomanteum was not ideal, but it was effective enough for about 60 percent of our group to experience an encounter of some sort. Two participants had very pronounced interactions with deceased loved ones. One of these encounters may have contributed to a spontaneous healing, reversing a very serious medical condition for which surgery had been scheduled the following week.
Dr. Moody's first love is humor and we were treated to some of his hysterical sketches. "Humor is the great repository of the human condition."
He further confessed that he would like to experiment next with the "geni in a bottle" concept. In by gone days metal lamps were used for divination in a practice that was called lampadomancy. Get your Aladdin's lamps ready because this is just one of many experiments that we hope to conduct at a Paranormal Camp, sometime in the future.
