Leaving the body at the time of death
According to the stories of those who returned from another world, the first thing that happens to the dead is that they leave the body and exist completely separately from it, without losing consciousness. As a rule, a person sees everything that surrounds him, including his dead body and resuscitation by doctors; he feels himself in a state of painless warmth and lightness, as if he were swimming; he is absolutely incapable of influencing others by speech or touch, and therefore at first there is often a strong feeling of loneliness; his thought processes tend to be much faster than when he was in the body. Here are some short excerpts from the description of the experience, the soul's leaving the body:
“The day was very cold, but while I was in this blackness, I felt only warmth and utmost calmness, which I have never experienced … I remember a thought came; "I must have died."
“I had the most wonderful sensations. I didn't feel anything, only peace, calmness, lightness - just calmness."
“I watched as I was revived, it was really strange. I was not very high, as if on some elevation, a little higher than them; just maybe looked over them. I tried to talk to them, but no one heard me, no one would have heard me."
“From everywhere, people walked to the scene of the accident … When they got very close, I tried to dodge to get out of their way, but they just passed through me.”
“I could not touch anything, could not communicate with those who surrounded me. It is a terrible feeling of loneliness, a feeling of complete isolation. I knew that I was absolutely alone, alone with myself."
By the way, there is amazing objective evidence that a person is actually out of the body at this time - sometimes a person can retell conversations or give exact details of what is happening even in neighboring rooms or even further away, while they were "dead". Among other examples of this kind, Dr. Kubler-Ross recounts one amazing case when a blind woman saw and then clearly described everything that happened in the room where she "died", although when she came back to life she was again blind - this is irrefutable proof that it is not the eyes that see (and it is not the brain that thinks, because after death the mental capabilities are sharpened), but rather the soul, which, while the body is alive, performs such actions with the help of physical organs, and when it is dead - with its own power.
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Nothing here can surprise an Orthodox Christian, because the experience described here is what Christians know as the exit of the soul from the body at the moment of death. In our time of unbelief, it is characteristic that people rarely resort to the Christian dictionary or realize that it was their soul that left the body and is now experiencing all this; as a rule, they are simply puzzled by the state in which they find themselves.
It is precisely such a person - baptized in Orthodoxy, but in the spirit of the end of the 19th century who remained indifferent to the truths of his own faith and did not even believe in the existence of an afterlife - and wrote a story about a "posthumous" experience, entitled "Incredible for many, but a true incident." (K. Ikskul. Trinity Flower. 1910).
What he transferred then is of great importance to us today and even seems providential in the light of the new modern "posthumous" experience, because this is the only "posthumous" experience of the soul, going much further than the brief fragmentary experiences cited in new books and experienced by a receptive person, who began with modern unbelief, and came to the recognition of the truths of Orthodox Christianity - and to such an extent that he ended his days as a monk.
This little book can be used as a test case against which to judge new cases. It was approved as not containing anything contrary to the Orthodox teaching on the afterlife by one of the leading Orthodox missionary writers of the early 20th century, Archbishop Nikon of Vologda.
After describing the last agony of his physical death and the terrible heaviness pressing him to the ground, the author said that “I suddenly felt that it became easy. I opened my eyes, and in my memory with absolute clarity, down to the smallest details, what I saw at that moment was imprinted.
On the state of mind immediately after death
I saw that I was standing alone in the middle of the room; to my right, encircling something in a semicircle, crowded all the medical personnel … I was surprised by this group; where she stood was a bunk. What now attracted the attention of these people, what did they look at when I was no longer there, when I stood in the middle of the room?
I moved over and looked where they were all looking: I was lying there on the bunk.
I don't remember experiencing anything like fear at the sight of my double; I was seized only by bewilderment: how is it? I felt myself here, and meanwhile and there I also …
I wanted to touch myself, to take my left hand with my right hand: my hand went right through; I tried to clasp myself around the waist - the hand went through the body again, as if through empty space … I began to call for a doctor, but the atmosphere in which I was was 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; a panic gripped me. In reality, there was something inexpressibly terrible in that extraordinary loneliness …
I looked, and only then for the first time a thought appeared before me: has it not happened to me that in our language, the language of living people, is defined by the word "death"? It occurred to me because my body, lying on the bed, looked absolutely like a corpse …
In our concepts, the word “death” is inextricably linked with the idea of some kind of destruction, the cessation of life, how could I think that I died when I did not lose consciousness for a single minute, when I felt the same alive, hearing everything, seeing, aware, able to move, think, speak?
Disconnection from everyone around me, my split personality could sooner make me understand what had happened, if I believed in the existence of the soul, was a religious person; but this was not, and I was guided only by what I felt, and the sensation of life was so clear that I was only perplexed at the strange phenomenon, being absolutely unable to connect my sensations with the traditional concept of death, that is, feeling and being conscious of myself, to think that I do not exist.
Remembering and pondering over time my then state, I noticed only that my mental faculties acted even then with amazing energy and speed ….
In early Christian literature, the state of mind in the first minutes after death is not described in such detail, the emphasis is always on stronger experiences that come later. Probably, only in our time, when the identification of life with life in the body has become so complete and convincing, it would be possible to expect so much attention to be paid to the first few minutes when the expectation of modern man is so completely turned upside down: death is not the end, life continues, an absolutely new state opens up to the soul!
Of course, there is nothing in this experience that contradicts the Orthodox teaching about the state of the soul immediately after death. Some, criticizing this case, doubted whether a person was dead if he was revived a few minutes later, but this is only a matter of technique. The fact remains that in these few minutes (sometimes also a minute before death) experiences take place that cannot be explained simply as a hallucination. Our task here is to find how we should understand these experiences.
Seraphim Rose