Is there life after death - scientific evidence. Evidence of the existence of life after death from famous experts

If we look at the history of mankind from afar, we will notice: Each era had its own prohibitions. And often entire layers of culture were formed around these prohibitions.

The ban of Christianity by the pagan rulers of Europe resulted in the incredible popularity of the teachings of Jesus Christ, which gradually destroyed paganism as a belief.

Theories about the central position of the sun and the round earth appeared in the strict Middle Ages, where it was necessary, under pain of the Inquisition, to believe only in the opinion expressed by the church. In the 19th century, the topics of sex were taboo - Freudian psychoanalysis arose, overwhelming the minds of his contemporaries.

Is it possible to believe in life after death?

Now, in our century, there is an unspoken ban on everything related to death. This primarily concerns Western society. For the deceased rulers of medieval Mongolia, mourning was observed for at least 2 years. Now, news of disaster victims is forgotten literally the next day; grief for relatives lasts only among their closest descendants. Reflections on this topic should only be done in churches, during national mourning, and at wakes.

Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran once remarked:"To die is to cause inconvenience to others." If a person seriously thinks about whether there is life after death, then this becomes a note in the psychiatrist’s notebook (study the DSM 5 psychiatry manual at your leisure).

Perhaps this was all created because of the fear of world governments of people who are too smart. Anyone who has recognized the frailty of existence, believes in the immortality of the soul, ceases to be a cog in the system, an uncomplaining consumer.

What's the point of working hard to buy branded clothes if death multiplies everything by zero? These and similar thoughts among citizens are not beneficial to politicians and transnational companies. That is why the general repression of themes of the afterlife is secretly encouraged.

Death: the end or just the beginning?

Let's start off with: whether there is life after death or not. There are two approaches here:

this life does not exist, a person with his mind simply disappears. The position of atheists;
there is life.

In the last paragraph, another division of opinions can be discerned. They all have a common belief in the existence of the soul:

the soul of a person moves into a new person or into an animal, plant, etc. This is what Hindus, Buddhists and some other cults think;
the soul goes to specific places: heaven, hell, nirvana. This is the position of almost all world religions.
the soul remains in peace, can help his relatives or, on the contrary, harm, etc. (Shintoism).

Clinical death as a way of studying

Often doctors tell amazing stories associated with their patients who experienced clinical death. This is a condition when a person’s heart has stopped and he is as if dead, but within 10 minutes he can be brought back to life with the help of resuscitation measures.

So, these people talk about different objects that they saw in the hospital, “flying” around it.

One patient noticed a forgotten shoe under the stairs, although she had no way of knowing about it because she was admitted unconscious. Imagine the surprise of the medical staff when a lone shoe actually lay in the indicated place!

Others, thinking that they had already died, began to “go” to their home and see what was happening there.

One patient noticed a broken cup and a new blue dress on her sister. When the woman was revived, the same sister came to her. She said that, indeed, while her sister was in a state of near death, her cup broke. And the dress was new, blue...

Life after death Confession of a dead man

Scientific evidence of life after death

Until recently (by the way, for good reason. Astrologers talk about the coming era of control of minds by Pluto, which arouses people’s interest in death, secrets, and the synthesis of science and metaphysics), scientists answered the question of the existence of life after death in the unequivocal negative.

Now this seemingly unshakable opinion is changing. In particular, quantum physics directly speaks of parallel worlds that are lines. A person constantly moves through them and thereby chooses his fate. Death only means the disappearance of an object on this line, but its continuation on another. That is, eternal life.

Psychotherapists give the example of regressive hypnosis. It allows you to look into a person’s past, and into past lives.

So, in the USA, after a session of such hypnosis, one American woman declared herself the incarnation of a Swedish peasant woman. One could assume a clouding of reason and laugh, but when the woman began to speak fluently in an ancient Swedish dialect unknown to her before, it was no longer a laughing matter.

Facts about the existence of afterlife

Many people report dead people coming to them. There are many of these stories. Skeptics say that this is all fiction. That's why let's look at the documented facts from people who were not prone to fantasy and insanity.

For example, Napoleon Bonaparte's mother Letitia reported how her tenderly loving son, imprisoned on the island of St. Helena, once came to her house and told her today's date and time, and then disappeared. And only two months later a message came about his death. It happened exactly at the same time when he came to his mother in the form of a ghost.

In Asian countries, there is a custom of making marks on the skin of a dead person so that after reincarnation, relatives can recognize him.

A documented case of a boy born, who had a birthmark in exactly the same place where the mark was made on his own grandfather, who died a few days before the birth.

By the same principle, they are still looking for future Tibetan lamas - leaders of Buddhism. The current Dalai Lama, Lhamo Thondrub (14th), is considered to be the same person as his predecessors. Even as a child, he recognized the things of the 13th Dalai Lama, saw dreams from a past incarnation, etc.

By the way, another lama - Dashi Itigelov, has been preserved in an incorruptible form since his death in 1927. Medical experts have proven that the composition of mummy hair, nails, and skin have lifetime characteristics. They could not explain this, but they recognized it as a fact. Buddhists themselves speak of the teacher as having passed into nirvana. He can return to his body at any time.

Korotkov Konstantin Georgievich

Doctor of Technical Sciences

Treatises of ancient civilizations have been written about the immortality of the soul, about its exit from an immobilized dead body, myths and canonical religious teachings have been composed, but we would also like to receive evidence using the methods of exact sciences. It seems that the St. Petersburg scientist managed to achieve this . If his experimental data and the hypothesis built on their basis about the exit of the subtle body from the deceased physical body are confirmed by the research of other scientists, religion and science will finally agree that human life does not end with the last exhalation.

Konstantin Georgievich, what you did is both incredible and natural at the same time. Every reasonable person, to one degree or another, believes or at least secretly hopes that his soul is immortal. “Does not believe in the immortality of the soul; - Leo Tolstoy wrote, “only those who have never seriously thought about death.” However, science, which has replaced God for half of humanity, does not seem to give reason for optimism. So the long-awaited breakthrough has been made: the light of eternal life has dawned before us at the end of the tunnel, which no one can escape?

I would refrain from making such categorical statements. The experiments I conducted are rather a reason for other researchers to use precise methods to find the threshold between the earthly existence of a person and the afterlife of the soul. How one-sided is the transition across this threshold? At what point is it still possible to return? - the question is not only theoretical and philosophical, but also key in the daily practice of resuscitators: it is extremely important for them to obtain a clear criterion for the body’s transition beyond the threshold of earthly existence.

You dared to set the goal of your experiments to answer a question that had previously puzzled only theosophists, esotericists and mystics. What arsenal of modern science allowed you to pose the problem in this form?

My experiments were made possible thanks to a method created in Russia more than a century ago. It was forgotten, and in the 20s it was revived again by the inventors from Krasnodar, the Kirlian spouses. In a high-intensity electromagnetic field around a living object, be it a green leaf or a finger, a radiant glow appears. Moreover, the characteristics of this glow directly depend on the energy state of the object. Around the finger of a healthy, cheerful person, the glow is bright and even. Any disorders of the body - which is fundamentally important, not only those already identified, but also future ones that have not yet manifested themselves in organs and systems - break the luminous halo, deform it and make it dimmer. A special diagnostic direction in medicine has already been formed and recognized, which makes it possible to draw current conclusions about upcoming diseases based on inhomogeneities, cavities and darkening in a Kirlian image. The German doctor P. Mandel, having processed enormous statistical material, even created an atlas in which certain errors in the state of the body correspond to various features of the glow.

So, twenty years of working with the Kirlian effect pushed me to the idea of seeing how the glow around living matter changes as it becomes inanimate.

Did you, like Academician Pavlov, who dictated a diary of his own death to his students, photograph the process of dying?

No, I did something different: I began to study the bodies of recently deceased people using Kirlian photographs. An hour to three hours after death, the motionless hand of the deceased was photographed hourly in a gas-discharge flash. The images were then processed on a computer to determine changes in the parameters of interest over time. Filming of each object took from three to five days. The ages of the deceased men and women ranged from 19 to 70 years, and their manner of death was different.

And this, no matter how strange it may seem to some, was reflected in the photographs.

The set of obtained gas-discharge curves was naturally divided into three groups:

a) relatively small amplitude of oscillations of the curves;

b) also a small amplitude, but there is one well-defined peak;

c) large amplitude of very long oscillations.

These differences are purely physical, and I would not mention them to you if the changes in parameters were not so clearly linked to the nature of the death of those photographed. But thanatologists—researchers of the process of dying of living organisms—have never had such a relationship before.

Here's how the deaths of people from the three groups mentioned above differed:

a) “calm”, natural death of a senile organism that has exhausted its life resource;

b) “abrupt” death - also natural, but still accidental: as a result of an accident, blood clot, traumatic brain injury, or help not arriving in time;

c) “unexpected” death, sudden, tragic, which, had circumstances been happier, could have been avoided; Suicides also belong to this group.

Here it is, completely new material for science: the nature of death is literally displayed on the instruments.

The most striking thing about the results obtained is that oscillatory processes, in which rises alternate with declines over several hours, are characteristic of objects with active life activity. And I photographed the dead... This means that there is no fundamental difference between the dead and the living when Kirlian photography is done! But then death itself is not a break, not an instant event, but a gradual process, a slow transition.

- And how long does this transition last?

The fact of the matter is that the duration in different groups is also different:

a) “calm” death revealed in my experiments fluctuations in glow parameters over a period of 16 to 55 hours;

b) “sharp” death leads to a visible jump either after 8 hours or at the end of the first day, and two days after death the fluctuations converge to the background level;

c) with “unexpected” death, the oscillations are the strongest and longest, their amplitude decreases from the beginning to the end of the experiment, the glow dims at the end of the first day and especially sharply at the end of the second; in addition, every evening after nine and until approximately two or three o'clock in the morning, bursts of glow intensity are observed.

- Well, it’s just some kind of scientific and mystical thriller: at night the dead come to life!

Legends and customs associated with the dead are receiving unexpected experimental confirmation.

Who would know what it is abroad - a day after death, two days? But since these intervals are readable on my diagrams, it means that something corresponds to them.

- Have you somehow identified nine and forty days after death - especially significant intervals in Christianity?

I did not have the opportunity to conduct such long-term experiments. But I am convinced that the period from three to 49 days after death is a crucial period for the soul of the deceased, marked by its separation from the body. Either she is traveling at this time between two worlds, or the Higher Mind is deciding her future fate, or the soul is going through circles of ordeal - different faiths describe different nuances of the same, apparently, process, which is reflected on our computers.

- So, the afterlife of the soul has been scientifically proven?

Do not misunderstand me. I obtained experimental data, used metrologically proven equipment, standardized methods, data processing was carried out at different stages by different operators, I took care of evidence of the absence of influence of meteorological conditions on the operation of the instruments... That is, I did everything possible for a conscientious experimenter to ensure that the results were as accurate as possible. objective. Remaining within the framework of the Western scientific paradigm, I, in principle, must avoid mentioning the soul or the separation of the astral body from the physical; these are concepts organic to the occult and mystical teachings of Eastern science. And although, as we remember, “The West is the West, and the East is the East, and they cannot come together,” they converge in my research. If we talk about scientific proof of the afterlife, we will inevitably have to clarify whether we mean Western or Eastern science.

- Maybe just such research is called upon to unite the two sciences?

We have every right to hope that this will eventually happen. Moreover, the ancient treatises of mankind on the transition from life to death are fundamentally the same among all traditional religions.

Since the living body and the body of the recently deceased are very similar in the characteristics of the gas-discharge glow, it is not entirely clear what death is. At the same time, I specifically conducted a series of similar experiments with meat - both fresh and frozen. No fluctuations in the glow of these objects were noted. It turns out that the body of a person who died a few hours or days ago is much closer to a living body than to meat. Tell this to the pathologist - I think he will be surprised.

As you can see, the energy-information structure of a person is no less real than his material body. These two hypostases are connected with each other during a person’s life and break this connection after death not immediately, but gradually, according to certain laws. And if we recognize a motionless body with stopped breathing and heartbeat, a non-functioning brain as dead, this does not at all mean that the astral body is dead.

Moreover, the separation of the astral and physical bodies can somewhat separate them in space.

- Well, we’ve already agreed on phantoms and ghosts.

What to do, in our conversation these are not folklore or mystical images, but a reality recorded by instruments.

Are you really implying that the dead man is lying on the table, and his flickering ghost is walking around the house left by the deceased?

I’m not hinting, but I’m talking about this with the responsibility of a scientist and a direct participant in the experiments.

On the very first experimental night, I felt the presence of a certain entity. It turned out that this is a common reality for pathologists and morgue attendants.

Periodically going down to the basement to measure parameters (which is where the experiments were carried out), on the first night I experienced an insane attack of fear. For me, a hunter and experienced climber seasoned in extreme situations, fear is not the most characteristic state. With an effort of will I tried to overcome it. But in this case it didn’t work. The fear subsided only with the onset of morning. And on the second night it was scary, and on the third, but with repetitions the fear gradually weakened.

Analyzing the reason for my fear, I realized that it was objective. When, going down to the basement, I was heading towards the object of research, before I even reached it, I clearly felt eyes on me. Whose? There was no one in the room except me and the dead man. Everyone feels a gaze directed at themselves. Usually, when he turns around, he meets someone's eyes fixed on him. In this case, there was a look, but there were no eyes. Moving either closer to the gurney with the body, then further from it, I experimentally established that the source of the gaze was located five to seven meters from the body. Moreover, every time I caught myself feeling that the invisible observer was here by right, and I was there by my own volition.

Typically, work associated with periodic measurements required being near the body for about twenty minutes. During this time I was very tired, and the work itself could not cause this fatigue. Repeated sensations of the same kind prompted the idea of a natural loss of energy in the basement.

- Did the Phantom suck your energy?

Not just mine. The same thing happened to my assistants, which only confirmed the non-randomness of my feelings. Even worse, the doctor of the experimental group - an experienced professional who had performed autopsies on corpses for many years - in our work touched a piece of bone, tore his glove, but did not notice the scratch, and the next day he was taken away by ambulance with blood poisoning.

What kind of sudden puncture? As he later admitted to me, for the first time, a pathologist had to stay near corpses for a long time, and at night. At night, fatigue is stronger, vigilance is weaker. But besides this, as we now know for certain, the activity of a dead body is higher, especially if it is a suicide.

True, I am not a supporter of the view that the dead suck energy from the living. Perhaps the process is not so clear cut. The body of the recently deceased is in a complex state of transition from life to death. There is still an unknown process of energy flowing from the body into another world. If another person enters the zone of this energy process, it can be fraught with damage to his energy-informational structure.

- Is that why the deceased is being buried?

In the funeral service, prayers for the soul of the newly deceased, in only kind words and thoughts about him, there is a deep meaning that rational science has not yet reached. A soul making a difficult transition should be helped. If we intrude into its domain, even for what seems to us to be excusable research purposes, we apparently expose ourselves to an unexplored, although intuitively guessable, danger.

- And the reluctance of the church to bury suicides in consecrated ground is confirmed by your research?

Yes, perhaps those violent fluctuations in the first two days after voluntary death, which our computers recorded when calculating Kirlian photographs of a suicide, provide a rational basis for this custom. After all, we still don’t know anything about what then happens to the souls of the dead and how they interact with each other.

But our conclusion about the absence of a tangible boundary between life and death (according to the experiments conducted) allows us to assume the truth of the judgment that the soul, after the death of the body, continues in the afterlife the same fate of the same person living in a different reality.

However, as Natalya Bekhtereva, a famous scientist who has studied the activity of the brain all her life, said, our consciousness is such matter that it seems that the keys to the secret door have already been selected. But behind it there are ten more... What is behind the door of life? Nothingness? Another life? This is what AiF journalists and experts are trying to find out.

“She sees right through everything...”

Galina Lagoda was returning with her husband in a Zhiguli car from a country trip. Trying to pass an oncoming truck on a narrow highway, the husband sharply pulled to the right... The car was crushed by a tree standing by the road.

Intravision

Galina was brought to the Kaliningrad regional hospital with severe brain damage, ruptured kidneys, lungs, spleen and liver, and many fractures. The heart stopped, the pressure was at zero.

Having flown through black space, I found myself in a shining space filled with light,” Galina Semyonovna tells me twenty years later. “In front of me stood a huge man in dazzling white clothes. I couldn’t see his face because of the light beam directed at me. “Why did you come here?” - he asked sternly. “I’m very tired, let me rest a little.” - “Rest and come back - you still have a lot to do.”

Having regained consciousness after two weeks, during which she balanced between life and death, the patient told the head of the intensive care unit, Evgeniy Zatovka, how the operations were carried out, which of the doctors stood where and what they did, what equipment they brought, from which cabinets they took what.

After another operation on a shattered arm, Galina, during her morning medical rounds, asked the orthopedic doctor: “How is your stomach?” From amazement, he did not know what to answer - indeed, the doctor was tormented by abdominal pain.

Then the woman healed the sick. She was especially successful in healing fractures and ulcers in just two sessions. Galina Semyonovna lives in harmony with herself, believes in God and is not at all afraid of death.

"Flying like a cloud"

Yuri Burkov, a reserve major, does not like to remember the past. His wife Lyudmila told his story:

- Yura fell from a great height, broke his spine and received a traumatic brain injury, and lost consciousness. After cardiac arrest, he lay in a coma for a long time.

I was under terrible stress. During one of my hospital visits I lost my keys. And the husband, having finally regained consciousness, first of all asked: “Did you find the keys?” I shook my head in fear. “They are under the stairs,” he said.

Only many years later did he confess to me: while he was in a coma, he saw my every step and heard every word - no matter how far I was from him. He flew in the form of a cloud, including to where his deceased parents and brother live. The mother tried to persuade her son to return, and the brother explained that they were all alive, only they no longer had bodies.

Years later, sitting at the bedside of his seriously ill son, he reassured his wife: “Lyudochka, don’t cry, I know for sure that he won’t leave now. He will be with us for another year." And a year later, at the wake of his deceased son, he admonished his wife: “He did not die, but only moved to another world before you and me. Trust me, I’ve been there.”

Savely KASHNITSKY, Kaliningrad - Moscow

Childbirth under the ceiling

“While the doctors were trying to pump me out, I observed an interesting thing: a bright white light (there is nothing like that on Earth!) and a long corridor. And so I seem to be waiting to enter this corridor. But then the doctors resuscitated me. During this time I felt that it was very cool THERE. I didn’t even want to leave!”

These are the memories of 19-year-old Anna R., who survived clinical death. Such stories can be found in abundance on Internet forums where the topic of “life after death” is discussed.

Light in the tunnel

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, pictures of life flashing before your eyes, a feeling of love and peace, meetings with deceased relatives and some luminous creature - patients who returned from the other world talk about this. True, not all, but only 10-15% of them. The rest did not see or remember anything at all. The dying brain does not have enough oxygen, which is why it is “glitchy,” say skeptics.

Disagreements among scientists have reached the point that the start of a new experiment was recently announced. For three years, American and British doctors will study the testimony of patients whose hearts stopped or their brains turned off. Among other things, the researchers are going to put various pictures on the shelves in the intensive care wards. You can see them only by soaring right up to the ceiling. If patients who have experienced clinical death retell their contents, it means that consciousness is really capable of leaving the body.

One of the first who tried to explain the phenomenon of near-death experiences was academician Vladimir Negovsky. He founded the world's first Institute of General Reanimatology. Negovsky believed (and the scientific view has not changed since then) that the “light at the end of the tunnel” was explained by the so-called tube vision. The cortex of the occipital lobes of the brain dies off gradually, the field of vision narrows to a narrow strip, creating the impression of a tunnel.

In a similar way, doctors explain the vision of pictures of a past life flashing before the gaze of a dying person. Brain structures fade and then recover unevenly. Therefore, a person has time to remember the most vivid events deposited in his memory. And the illusion of leaving the body, according to doctors, is the result of a failure of nerve signals. However, skeptics reach a dead end when it comes to answering trickier questions. Why do people who are blind from birth, at the moment of clinical death, see and then describe in detail what is happening in the operating room around them? And there is such evidence.

Leaving the body is a defensive reaction

It is curious, but many scientists do not see anything mystical in the fact that consciousness can leave the body. The only question is what conclusion to draw from this. Leading researcher at the Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dmitry Spivak, who is a member of the International Association for the Study of Near-Death Experiences, assures that clinical death is only one of the options for an altered state of consciousness. “There are a lot of them: these are dreams, and drug experience, and a stressful situation, and the consequence of illness,” he says. “According to statistics, up to 30% of people at least once in their lives have felt leaving the body and observed themselves from the outside.”

Dmitry Spivak himself examined the mental state of women in labor and found that about 9% of women experience “leaving the body” during childbirth! Here is the testimony of 33-year-old S.: “During childbirth, I had a lot of blood loss. Suddenly I began to see myself from under the ceiling. The pain has disappeared. And about a minute later she also unexpectedly returned to her place in the room and again began to experience severe pain.” It turns out that “leaving the body” is a normal phenomenon during childbirth. Some kind of mechanism embedded in the psyche, a program that works in extreme situations.

Undoubtedly, childbirth is an extreme situation. But what could be more extreme than death itself?! It is possible that “flying in a tunnel” is also a protective program that is activated at a fatal moment for a person. But what will happen to his consciousness (soul) next?

“I asked one dying woman: if there really is something THERE, try to give me a sign,” recalls Doctor of Medical Sciences Andrei Gnezdilov, who works at the St. Petersburg hospice. - And on the 40th day after death, I saw her in a dream. The woman said: “This is not death.” Many years of working in a hospice have convinced me and my colleagues: death is not the end, not the destruction of everything. The soul continues to live."

Dmitry PISARENKO

Cup and polka dot dress

This story was told by Andrey Gnezdilov, Doctor of Medical Sciences: “During the operation, the patient’s heart stopped. The doctors were able to start it, and when the woman was transferred to intensive care, I visited her. She complained that she was not operated on by the same surgeon who promised. But she could not see the doctor, being in an unconscious state all the time. The patient said that during the operation some force pushed her out of her body. She calmly looked at the doctors, but then she was overcome by horror: what if I die before I can say goodbye to my mother and daughter? And her consciousness instantly moved home. She saw that the mother was sitting, knitting, and her daughter was playing with a doll. Then a neighbor came in and brought a polka dot dress for her daughter. The girl rushed towards her, but touched the cup - it fell and broke. The neighbor said: “Well, that’s good. Apparently, Yulia will be discharged soon.” And then the patient again found herself at the operating table and heard: “Everything is fine, she is saved.” Consciousness returned to the body.

I went to visit this woman’s relatives. And it turned out that during the operation... a neighbor came in with a polka dot dress for a girl and the cup was broken.”

This is not the only mysterious case in the practice of Gnezdilov and other workers of the St. Petersburg hospice. They are not surprised when a doctor dreams of his patient and thanks him for his care and touching attitude. And in the morning, upon arriving at work, the doctor finds out that the patient died during the night...

What happens to the brain

The occipital lobe of the brain is responsible for vision. When its cortex has already suffered from lack of oxygen and began to die, the central zone still lives. This explains the vision of light at the end of the tunnel.

The main signs of clinical death:

no breathing
no heartbeat
general pallor
no reaction of pupils to light

When the temporal cortex is irritated, a feeling of leaving the body appears. The point of perception of your body rises several meters higher.

Restoration of the brain during revitalization proceeds from its ancient parts to the young ones. Memories of life events emerge, from early to later.

During agony, the reflex to light may short-circuit in the brain stem. This makes the visual perception more vivid, “unearthly”.

The duration of clinical death depends on how long the subcortex and cerebral cortex remain viable in the absence of oxygen. Scientists distinguish two periods:

1) 5-6 minutes. If this period is exceeded, it is possible to “turn off” the cerebral cortex.

2) Tens of minutes. They are observed in special conditions - with electric shock, drowning, the use of certain medications, donor blood transfusions, etc. The death of the higher parts of the brain slows down.

Skeptic's opinion

Viktor Moroz, director of the Institute of General Reanimatology of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, chief anesthesiologist and resuscitator of Russia, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, professor, doctor of medical sciences:

The problem of the patient’s visions and experiences during the period of clinical death is far-fetched and fictitious. 99.9% of what paramedics talk about has nothing to do with medical practice.

Church opinion

Priest Vladimir Vigilyansky, head of the press service of the Moscow Patriarchate:

Orthodox people believe in an afterlife and immortality. There is much confirmation and evidence of this in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. We consider the very concept of death only in connection with the coming resurrection, and this mystery ceases to be such if we live with Christ and for Christ’s sake. “Whoever lives and believes in Me will never die,” says the Lord (John 11:26).

According to legend, in the first days the soul of the deceased walks through those places in which it worked the truth, and on the third day it ascends to heaven to the throne of God, where until the ninth day it is shown the abodes of saints and the beauty of paradise. On the ninth day, the soul again comes to God, and it is sent to hell, where wicked sinners reside and where the soul undergoes thirty days of ordeal (tests). On the fortieth day, the soul again comes to the Throne of God, where it appears naked before the judgment of its own conscience: has it passed these tests or not? And even in the case when some trials convict the soul of its sins, we hope for the mercy of God, in whom all deeds of sacrificial love and compassion will not go in vain.

The beginning of the twenty-first century - a study was published that was conducted by Peter Fenwick from the London Institute of Psychiatry and Sam Parin from Southampton Central Hospital. Researchers have obtained irrefutable evidence that human consciousness does not depend on brain activity and does not stop living when all processes in the brain have already stopped.

As part of the experiment, scientists studied medical histories and personally interviewed 63 cardiac patients who experienced clinical death. It turned out that 56 who returned from the other world did not remember anything. They lost consciousness and came to in the hospital room. But seven patients retained clear memories of their experiences. Four claimed that they were overcome by a feeling of calm and joy, the passage of time accelerated, the feeling of their body did not disappear, their mood improved, even became sublime. Then a bright light appeared, as evidence of a transition to another world. A little later, mythical creatures appeared that looked like angels or saints. The patients were in another world for some time, and then returned to our reality.

Let us note that these people were not pious at all. For example, three said they do not attend church at all. Therefore, it will not be possible to explain this kind of messages by religious fanaticism.

But what was sensational about the scientists’ research was something else entirely. After carefully studying the medical documentation of the patients, the doctors rendered a verdict - the prevailing opinion about the cessation of brain function due to oxygen deficiency is wrong. None of those who were in a state of clinical death recorded a significant decrease in the content of life-giving gas in the tissues of the central nervous system.

Another hypothesis was also erroneous: that the vision could be caused by an irrational combination of medications used during resuscitation. Everything was done strictly according to the standard.

Sam Parina assures that he started the experiment as a skeptic, but now he is one hundred percent sure that “there is something here.” “The respondents experienced their incredible states at a time when the brain was no longer functioning and was therefore unable to reproduce any memories.”

According to the British scientist, human consciousness is not a function of the brain. And if this is so, explains Peter Fenwick, “consciousness is quite capable of continuing its existence even after the death of the physical body.”

“When we conduct research on the brain,” wrote Sam Parina, “it is clear that brain cells in their structure are, in principle, no different from the rest of the body’s cells. They also produce protein and other chemicals, but they are not capable of creating the subjective thoughts and images that we define as human consciousness. In the end, we need our brain only as a receiver-transformer. It works like a kind of “living TV”: first it perceives the waves entering it, and then converts them into images and sound, from which complete pictures are formed.”

Later, in December 2001, three scientists from the Rijenstate Hospital (Holland), under the leadership of Pim Van Lommel, conducted the largest study to date of people who experienced clinical death. The results were published in the article "Near-death experiences of survivors" after cardiac arrest: a targeted study of a specially recruited group in the Netherlands in the British medical journal Lancet. Dutch researchers came to similar conclusions as their British colleagues from Southampton.

Based on statistical data obtained over a decade, researchers have found that not everyone who has experienced clinical death experiences visions. Only 62 patients (18%) out of 344 who underwent 509 resuscitations retained clear memories of their near-death experience.”

During clinical death, more than half of the patients experienced positive emotions.
Awareness of the fact of one's own death was noted in 50% of cases.
In 32% there were meetings with deceased people.
33% of the dying reported passing through the tunnel.
Pictures of an alien landscape have been seen by almost as many reanimated ones.
The phenomenon of leaving the body (when a person looks at himself from the outside) was experienced by 24% of respondents.
A blinding flash of light was recorded by the same number of those brought back to life.
In 13% of cases, those resuscitated observed images of their lives flashing by in succession.
Less than 10% of respondents spoke about seeing the border between the world of the living and the dead.
None of the clinical death survivors reported frightening or unpleasant sensations.
Particularly impressive is the fact that people who were blind from birth spoke about visual impressions; they literally repeated the stories of sighted people verbatim.

It will be interesting to note that a little earlier Dr. Ring from America made attempts to find out the content of the dying visions of people blind from birth. He and his colleague Sharon Cooper recorded the testimonies of 18 blind people who, for some reason, found themselves in a state of “temporary death.”

According to the testimonies of those interviewed, dying visions were the only opportunity for them to understand what it means to “see.”

One of the resuscitated people, Vicky Yumipeg, survived “” in the hospital. Vicky looked from somewhere above at her body lying on the operating table, and at the team of doctors carrying out resuscitation measures. This is how she saw and understood for the first time what light is.

Martin Marsh, blind from birth, who experienced similar near-death visions, remembered most of all the variety of colors of the surrounding world. Martin is confident that his post-mortem experience helped him understand how sighted people see the world.

But let's return to the research of scientists from Holland. They set a goal to accurately determine when people have visions: during clinical death or during the period of brain function. Van Lammel and his colleagues claim that they have succeeded in doing this. The researchers’ conclusion is that visions are observed precisely during the “switching off” of the central nervous system. As a result, it was shown that consciousness exists independently of the functioning of the brain.

Perhaps Van Lammel considers the most surprising case recorded by one of his colleagues. The patient was taken to intensive care. Resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful. The brain died, the encephalogram showed a straight line. It was decided to use intubation (insert a tube into the larynx and trachea for artificial ventilation and restore patency of the airway). The patient had a denture in his mouth. The doctor took it out and put it in the desk drawer. An hour and a half later, the patient’s heartbeat resumed and his blood pressure returned to normal. And a week later, when the same doctor entered the room, the resuscitated person told her, “You know where my prosthesis is! You pulled out my teeth and put them in the drawer of the table on wheels! Upon careful questioning, it turned out that the operated patient observed himself lying on top of the operating table. He described in detail the ward and the actions of the doctors during his death. The man was very afraid that the doctors would stop reviving him, and tried in every possible way to make them understand that he was alive...

Dutch scientists confirm their confidence that consciousness can exist separately from the brain by the purity of their experiments. To exclude the possibility of so-called false memories (cases when a person, having heard from others stories about visions during clinical death, suddenly “remembers” something that he himself did not experience), religious fanaticism and other similar cases, scientists carefully studied all the factors that capable of influencing victims' reports.

All respondents were mentally healthy. These were men and women aged from 26 to 92 years old, with different levels of education, believers and non-believers in God. Some have previously heard of “post-mortem experience”, others have not.

The general conclusions of the Dutch researchers are as follows:

Post-mortem visions in a person appear during the suspension of brain function.
They cannot be explained by a lack of oxygen in the cells of the central nervous system.
The depth of “near-death experiences” is greatly influenced by a person’s gender and age. Women generally experience stronger sensations than men.
Most of those resuscitated who had a deeper “post-mortem experience” died within a month after resuscitation.
The experience of dying of those born blind is no different from that of sighted people.

All of the above gives grounds to assert that at the moment scientists have come close to scientifically substantiating the immortality of the soul.

All we have to do is just a little to realize that death is only a transfer station on the border between two Worlds, and overcome fear before its inevitability.

The question arises: where does the soul go after the death of a person?

“If you died after living an unrighteous life, then you will not go to hell, but will forever be on the earthly plane during the worst periods of humanity. If your life was impeccable, then in this case you will find yourself on Earth, but in an age where there is no place for violence and cruelty.”

This is the opinion of French psychotherapist Michel Lerier, author of the book “Eternity in a Past Life.” He was convinced of this through numerous interviews and hypnotic sessions with people who had been in a state of clinical death.