For decades, the topic of the afterlife has been discussed with continued interest. The memories of eyewitnesses who survived clinical death, as a rule, are full of vivid descriptions of hovering over their own bodies, long tunnels leading to the light, unearthly voices explaining to the deceased that his time has not yet come, as well as meetings with long-dead relatives.
Where I have been, all are young
Those who have returned from the afterlife regard these “journeys” as religious visions and see them as confirmation of the theory of the afterlife. But some scholars believe this is not the case.
“Official science has its own explanation of the reasons for such feelings. We think that near-death experiences can be explained by the rise in electrical energy in the electroencephalogram of dying patients, which is released when the brain lacks oxygen,”says Lakhmeer Chawla, an intensive care physician at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington. “When the blood supply slows down and the oxygen level drops, the brain cells produce one last electrical impulse. It starts in one part of the brain and spreads like an avalanche, and this can give people a lively mental sensation. People reanimated after clinical death remember these sensations, taking them for reflections of the phenomena that actually happened."
The theory is quite coherent, but it cannot explain the case that recently happened with Colton Burpo, son of Pastor Todd Burpo of Nebraska. A four-year-old child, who was belatedly diagnosed with purulent appendicitis, experienced clinical death, and when he regained consciousness, he told others that he had been to paradise.
The stories Colton told could be attributed to childhood fantasies, if not for some circumstances.
“Colton describes in detail how he heard the angelic singing. A boy from a priest's family, of course, knows the words of religious hymns and told his parents that the angels sang to him Jesus loves me and about the battle for Jericho. According to him, the heavens are full of bright colors and myriad rainbows."
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But this is not the main thing. The child told his parents that "in heaven" he was met by a girl who introduced herself as his sister. The boy did not know anything about her existence - his parents had never told him before that his mother had a miscarriage several years ago.
In addition, little Colton also claimed to have met his own great-grandfather in paradise, who died in general 30 years before the boy was born.
The child was shown several old photographs from the family archive, which he had never seen before. He did not recognize his great-grandfather in the photo taken in his old age shortly before his death, but he pointed with confidence to the picture where his great-grandfather was photographed in his youth.
“According to Colton, where he has been, they are all young. You will like it there,”he urged everyone. He has no doubts about where he visited and with whom he communicated. I was sitting on the lap of Jesus, "he said to his father, looking him straight in the eyes."
"After this incident, Todd Burpo wrote the book Heaven Really Is," which immediately became a bestseller in the United States."
Memory of previous incarnations
By the way, a similar case happened a little earlier in Mexico. Five-year-old Petro Volpato spent three months in a state of lethargic sleep, and when, finally, the doctors managed to awaken him, the boy said that he had been, like Colton Burpo, in heaven.
Petro's stories about his "travels" in a state of deep sleep, close to death, are now the subject of research by psychologists.
It all began with the fact that Petro unsuccessfully fell off his bike, hit his head on the pavement and lost consciousness. At the clinic, doctors fought for three months to save his life. The boy survived, and when he woke up, he began to tell incredible things.
The parents, overwhelmed with happiness in connection with the healing of the child, at first did not attach much importance to the chatter of a five-year-old boy, but then they were amazed at his stories and decided to call a psychologist.
For example, Petro never saw his grandmother, who died several months before his birth. She was born in Naples, Italy, and spoke in a dialect that the boy had never heard. Now he can repeat the words that his grandmother loved to use in her vocabulary. Moreover, he sings the deceased's favorite song, which, according to the boy, his grandmother taught him in paradise.
Petro told doctors about other events that took place before his birth. In particular, when the grandmother was taken to the hospital before her death, and the mother was already pregnant with him, Petro's father, Luciano, was categorically opposed to his wife in such a state accompanying the sick old woman.
The boy repeated word for word the dialogue that had taken place at that time between his parents, although in accordance with all the laws of medical science he could not hear it.
Mexican psychologist Victor Milani, who watched the boy in the afterlife, like most other scientists, does not believe and claims that it is not about Petro's "journey" to "heaven."
In his opinion, for the first time in his long-term practice, he has to deal with an exceptionally pronounced case of awakening human memory, which experts call genetic.
Sometimes, according to Dr. Milani, people who are in a state of deepest hypnosis can recall episodes from very early childhood or even the period before their birth. However, an extraordinary exception that raises doubts in the scientific community is the so-called memory of previous incarnations, the memory of ancestors, which Petro Volpato is currently demonstrating.
