The existence of life after death
In all religions, even a ghostly, but life after death is mentioned. Thoughts about the absolute destruction of the personality after the death of the body are very rare.
An insurmountable psychological difficulty to believe that having died a person will disappear into oblivion, making the searches of people related at all times. Man is not an animal! Life exists after death! And this is not a simple assumption, not some kind of blind faith or vague intuition, but first of all the human experience of experiencing many facts that convincingly indicate that the life of a person does not stop after death. Reports of this, often incredible, are found wherever literary sources have remained. And in all of them the same idea runs like a red thread: personality is indestructible!
• A rather curious incident from his life was told to me by my neighbor, teacher S. A. Zhuravlev (1913 - 1997), who lived in Sergiev Posad. I knew him well as a decent person, mentally completely normal, and therefore I have no doubts about the reliability of what he told me. At the age of twenty, he became very ill with typhus, the temperature was over forty and he was taken to the hospital. And then one day he suddenly felt an unprecedented lightness and saw himself in the middle of the chamber in which he was lying. It was May 1, he remembered his friends and immediately found himself next to them. They cheerfully celebrated with vodka in nature, talked, laughed, but his efforts to talk to them were completely in vain: no one saw or heard him.
Then he thought about a girl he knew and also found himself next to her. He saw her sitting with a familiar young man, listened to their warm conversation, and they did not pay attention to him either. Then the thought came - I was sick, and then I saw myself in the ward, and at his bed there were already two nurses with a stretcher and a doctor who said: "He is dead and he must be taken to the dead" (as the morgue was called then). At the same time, he felt intense cold and heard the cry of women: "He is alive!"
After returning to life, Sergei's temperature returned to normal. He was discharged a day later. But the most curious thing was further. Sergei, upon leaving for work, hinted to his colleagues how they walked on May 1 and what they were talking about, to which they were extremely surprised and tried to find out who could tell him this (they probably said something not for the general public). And the girl, when he told her in detail about the conversation and behavior with the other guy, was completely confused. A natural question arises: if there is no soul, then could the corpse, and even the one in the ward, tell everything so accurately about what happened far outside the hospital?
• A remarkable story in this regard by K. Ikskul, which was published under the title "Incredible for many, but a true incident." What was said makes a strong impression with its sincerity and there is no slightest doubt about the reality of what was happening. The most curious thing about him is the fact of continuous consciousness during the transition from physical life to soul life. Ikskul, talking about his clinical death, said that at first he experienced heaviness, some pressure, and then suddenly felt complete lightness and freedom. Then, seeing his body, he guessed that it was dead. But he did not lose consciousness for a moment. "In our concept, the word" death "is inseparably linked to the idea of some kind of destruction, the cessation of life. How could I think that I was dead, when I did not lose consciousness for a second, when I felt the same alive, I heard everything,saw, was aware, was able to move, think, speak?"
Then he talks about his surprise when, finding himself in the middle of the ward and seeing a group of doctors, he looked over their shoulders - to where they all looked: “There I was lying on the bed …” “I… called the doctor, but the atmosphere in which I was, turned out to be completely unsuitable for me; she did not perceive and did not transmit the sounds of my voice, and I realized my complete disconnection from everyone around me, my strange loneliness, and panic seized me … I tried in every possible way and tried to declare myself, but these attempts only led me to complete despair. “Can't they see me?” I thought in despair and, again and again, approached the group of faces standing over my bed, but none of them looked around, paid no attention to me, and I looked at myself in perplexity, not in the strength to understand how they can not see me when I am the same as I was. But he tried to touch himself, and my hand again cut only the air."
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And the evidence of this kind is abundant. Sometimes the posthumous experiences of a person are associated with painful moments for him when he watched the shameful sight of the carving up of his inheritance. No one remembered the deceased anymore - no one needed him anymore (like a worn-out thing, worthy only to be thrown away as unnecessary), all attention was focused on money and things. And one can only imagine the horror of the “loving” relatives when the “deceased” came back to life. And what was it like for him to communicate with them now!
• And here is another fact that happened to the brother of Hegumen Nikon (Vorobyov) Vladimir Nikolaevich. At the age of seven, while playing rounders, he was accidentally hit very hard on the head with a stick, and he fell down dead. And he told how he saw himself high above this place, saw the confused boys next to his body, how one of them rushed to his home, and how his mother ran to him from the house with a cry and tears, grabbed him, began to fiddle with. And there was such an amazing sun and so good, joyful that when he came to, he roared with all his urine, but not from pain, as everyone thought, but from the fact that it was very sad and unpleasant twilight, like in some basement although the day was very sunny.
And there are many such facts. They are proof of the existence of the soul and its continuing life after the death of the body. And it should be emphasized that it is the soul that is the source of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and not the body. Mind, heart (as a sense organ), will - in the soul, not in the body.
Henri Bergson, a famous philosopher from France at the end of the 19th century, said that the human brain is only a telephone exchange, which only transmits, but is not a source of information. Information comes to the brain from somewhere, but it is perceived and transmitted to them in different ways. It can work well, and junk, and completely shut down. But he is just a transmission mechanism, not a generator of human consciousness. To date, many scientifically reliable facts fully confirm this idea of Bergson.
Now there are a large number of books written by scientists about the continuous life of a person after physical death. For example, the book of Dr. Raymond Moody - "Life After Life" in the United States made a sensation: 2 million copies were sold in the first year or two. With such speed, rarely do any books go. Many took it as a revelation. And although there were always enough such facts, they simply did not know about them, they did not attach importance to them, considering them as descriptions of hallucinations or manifestations of a person's mental abnormality. In this case, a doctor, a specialist, surrounded by the same specialists, speaks of facts and only facts. Moreover, he is a person who is not at all interested in "propaganda of religion."
I'm in hell
Something fundamentally new and important compared to the work of Dr. Moody can be found in the book "Beyond Death" by Moritz Roolings. This is a famous cardiologist, professor at the University of Tennessee (America), who many times revived people who were in a state of clinical death. The book contains many facts. It is curious that Roolings himself had previously been a person indifferent to religion, but after what happened in 1977 (this book begins with him), he began to look completely differently at the problem of man, soul, death, eternal life and God. What he described, in fact, makes you think seriously.
Roolings told how he began resuscitation of a patient who was in clinical death - using the usual massage in such cases, trying to make his heart work. This happened all the time in his practice. But what did he face this time, while, as he says, faced for the first time? This patient, as soon as consciousness returned to him for a while, "shouted shrilly": "I'm in hell!" "Don't stop!" The doctor asked what scared him. "You do not understand? I'm in hell! When you stop doing massage, I go to hell! Don't let me get there! " And this was repeated several times.
Roolings wrote that as a physically strong man, he sometimes did heart massage so diligently that there were times when he even broke the ribs of patients. Therefore, those, coming to their senses, usually begged: "Stop tormenting my chest, you are hurting me!" Here the doctor heard something absolutely unusual: "Don't stop!" And he writes further: “Only at that moment, when I looked at his face, I was seized by real anxiety. His expression was much worse than at the time of death. His face was distorted by an eerie grimace that personified horror, his pupils were dilated, and he himself was trembling, drenched in sweat - in a word, all this defied description."
Further, the cardiologist says that when this patient finally came to his senses, he told him what terrible suffering he experienced during his clinical death. The patient was ready to transfer anything, just not to return there. There was hell! Later, when Roolings began to seriously investigate such cases, began to ask his colleagues about this, it turned out that there are many similar facts in their practice. From that time on, he began to record the stories of resuscitated patients. Not everyone opened themselves up. But the stories of those who were frank were more than enough to make sure that the personality continued to live after the death of the body. But what kind of life?
In his book, Roolings, unlike Moody, talks not only about those who experienced states of joy, light, deep satisfaction there, so that they did not even want to return, but also about those who saw fiery lakes there, terrible monsters and experienced the most difficult experiences and sufferings there. And, as Roolings says, "The number of encounters with hell is increasing rapidly." In the following words, he summarizes the messages of the reanimated: "They argue that death - the thought of which scares the common man - is not an end to life or oblivion, but a transition from one form of life to another - sometimes pleasant and joyful, and at times gloomy and terrifying." …
Of particular interest are the facts he cites regarding the rescued suicides. All of them, without exception, experienced severe torment there. At the same time, these torments were associated both with mental, emotional experiences, and (especially) with visual ones. It was the hardest suffering. The unfortunate saw monsters, from the mere sight of which the soul shuddered, and there was nowhere to go, it was impossible to close your eyes, you cannot close your ears. There was no way out of this terrible state! When one poisoned girl was brought to her senses, she begged for only one thing: “Mom, help me! Make them move away from me … them, those demons in hell … It was so awful!"
Roolings also cited another very serious fact: most of his patients, who talked about the spiritual anguish they experienced at clinical death, fundamentally changed their moral life. Some, although they were silent, but in their subsequent lives it was possible to understand that they experienced something terrible.
A. Osipov