Death-Related Experiences Record Type: Review   ID: 38
Reunions: Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones Moody, Raymond, with Perry, Paul
Raymond Moody is certainly one of today’s most innovative investigators of the far reaches of human being, and perhaps necessarily, also one of the most perceptive and empathic explorers as well. He adapts his methods to the participants he studies, not the other way around. In Reunions, he introduces a new/old approach to exploring the interface between life and death or the unconscious by adapting for modern use an ancient oracular technique for inducing visionary encounters with the deceased. He calls the setting for this work the psychomanteum, in which a whole day is devoted per person in entering an environment conducive to recollection of and calling up the dead, culminating in a period of time in a darkened room before a mirror in which people see visions, sometimes of their deceased loved ones, sometimes of living persons. Sometimes they feel they are drawn into the mirror itself, entering a world that is like a lucid dream. Moody calls it "a way of exploring humankind’s propensity to believe in occult beings and supernatural forces" (p. xviii). In this handbook he describes the nature of the visions, the history of the visionary technique, details on setting up a modern-day psychomanteum, the role the visions play in self-discovery, instructions for creating one’s own psychomanteum, and future uses of mirror gazing. Moody recounts many examples of the use of mirror gazing. One of the most important is that it enables people who are locked in grief to move on with their lives. It also helps people to move on in other ways, not only in living their lives but in discovering who they are.
Publisher Information:	New York: Villard Books, 1993. 214p. Bibl: 209-212

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