Dr. Raymond Moody answers the question:

What is the nicest thing a non-family member has ever done for you?

Well, first of all, thank you very much for the question, because when you asked me, I reflected. I just decided to go with the first thing that popped into my mind, was that when I was 19 years old, I was an undergraduate Philosophy student at the University of Virginia.

My second year, there was this Philosophy honors program you could be in where you didn't have to go to any classes. All you had to do was a one-on-one session in which you would write a paper on some particular philosophical question, and you would sit there for an hour or so while your tutor... You read your paper and every word was, "What do you mean by that?" And so it was a very wonderful exercise in critical thinking.

The wonderful man, David Yalden-Thomson, he was, who was the Director of that program, admitted me near the end of my second year in college. So for the next two years, all I did was I went to my tutor once a week and I just read tons and tons of books. And during that time, my professors, my other professors that greatly influenced me, George Thomas was my Dissertation Advisor in Philosophy, and John Marshall was my mentor in that department. And so those guys and what they taught me and how they taught me to think, everything else that's come has come really from that very intensive college education I had. Those were the people who did the nicest thing to me who were not my relatives.

Dr. Raymond Moody is the leading authority on "near-death experiences" — a phrase he coined in the late seventies. Raymond's research into the phenomenon of near-death experience had its start in the 1960s. The New York Times calls him "The father of the near-death experience." He's a bestselling author of 12 books, including Life after Life and Reunions, which have sold over 13 million copies worldwide. He has also authored numerous academic and professional articles on near-death experiences and the relationship of language to consciousness.

Raymond continues to draw enormous public interest with his groundbreaking work on near-death experiences and other transpersonal aspects of grief and the dying process. He received the World Humanitarian Award in Denmark, and was honored with a bronze medal in the human relations category at the New York Film Festival for the movie version of Life After Life. Raymond has appeared three times on Oprah, as well as on hundreds of other local and nationally syndicated programs, including MSNBC, NBC's Today, ABC’s Turning Point, Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael Show, Geraldo, and The Joan Rivers Show.