Recently, more and more publications have appeared on the conditions experienced at the time of clinical death. Leaving his mortal body, a person sees a certain tunnel leading to the light, and then close relatives or friends appear, some kind luminous beings radiating love and forgiveness.
In other words, there, “beyond the threshold,” there is such a paradise without pain and misfortune that one does not want to return to earthly life. And suddenly there was a person who tells everything in a different way …
After receiving his master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Howard Storm has had a pretty decent academic career. For 20 years he taught visual arts at Northern Kentucky University, becoming a professor over the years. A convinced atheist, Ph. D. Storm did not believe in God or in the devil, and even more so in such fables as life after death. This was until 1985, when he suddenly died and went straight to … hell. Even now, he is noticeably worried, talking about the experiences he has experienced: he often pauses, he hardly calms down. According to the professor, that dramatic incident completely changed his life.
He experienced a state close to death not at home, but overseas. In 1985, Mr. Storm was 38 years old. He and his wife Beverly went to Paris. (Where else can you study fine art if not in the Louvre!) It so happened that on the last day of his stay in France, Mr. Storm literally doubled over from a burning, unbearable, tearing pain in his stomach. He was immediately taken to the hospital. There, in anticipation of an urgent operation, he felt that he was dying. And, having said goodbye to his wife, he plunged into impenetrable darkness …
After a while, Storm got up, realizing that he was in the ward and was standing between two hospital beds. He glanced at his wife Beverly, who sat motionless in her chair, staring blankly at the floor. He tried to speak to her, but his wife did not hear him. As Storm bent over the bed where Beverly was sitting, he noticed with dismay, almost with horror, the striking resemblance of the patient lying there to himself.
At that moment, from somewhere in the distance - maybe from the corridor or from the hall of the hospital - voices were heard. Pleasant voices, male and female, young and not so, they all called him - not in French, but in English: “Come out here,” they said. "Don't you want to make you feel better?"
And then Storm got worried. He took a few steps and left the room into the hall. It was light there, but a little hazy, so he could not see any details. But he followed the voices, automatically rearranging his bare feet and still remembering the pain in his stomach.
The fog, meanwhile, began to thicken, it grew darker, but those who called him continued to go forward. Storm struggled to keep up, although it was hard to move in the dark. The strength was running out, and he bitterly said that he could not go further.
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This is where it all started. Some creatures suddenly yelled at him, growled, hissed, began to shower insults and curses. Storm even felt their breath on him - so closely they huddled around him. Then they began to push and kick him. He broke down and fought back. In response, the creatures were completely brutal - screamed, squealed, mocked and … beat, beat, beat. Nothing could be seen in the pitch darkness, nevertheless it was felt that there were many tens or hundreds of them - around him, on him, under him, everywhere!
And every attempt on his part to stand up for himself provoked only a new fit of rage and anger on the part of invisible evil creatures.
They didn't just beat him - they enjoyed it! Then the worst began. He was simply torn into small pieces, ripping off a piece of flesh, and eaten alive: methodically, slowly, so as to prolong his pleasure as much as possible. And Storm stopped resisting.
But then he suddenly remembered the prayer he had taught as a child in the Sunday school at the church. And he began to whisper: "If I go through the valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear evil, because You are with me …"
To his surprise, the prayer, the meaning of which he did not really understand, had an unexpected effect: the cruel and ruthless creatures fell into an indescribable rage! They screamed in a frenzy: “There is no God! Nobody will hear you!”, But at the same time they began to back away. And the more insistently he whispered the words of the prayer, the more the creature rained curses, but still retreated further and further, until their screams turned into a distant inarticulate grumbling. Then it died down.
Left alone, Storm felt completely exhausted, crushed, exhausted. But all the same - albeit painfully, painfully - alive. And then he groaned into the darkness: "Lord Jesus, save me!..". And then a miracle happened. Somewhere in the distance, a point of light appeared in the darkness, like a tiny star in the sky. She began to approach, becoming brighter and brighter. It seemed to him that now this violent light would consume him. The radiance has already begun to penetrate into his body. And then he saw that this is a living creature - a man about two and a half meters tall, surrounded by light. Quite real hands gently hugged him and raised him, and he slowly began to straighten up, as if to come to life. The wounds healed and disappeared without a trace right before our eyes.
Storm woke up in a hospital bed. His wife was sitting next to him.
Let's briefly describe what happened next. Mr. Storm left his studies, entered theological seminary and after graduation became a priest in one of the parishes in Cincinnati. In 2000, he wrote the book “My immersion in death and the message of love that brought me back to life,” in which he sincerely admitted that before that incident in Paris he had violated almost all 10 commandments. And then, the story of his death and resurrection was told in The Standard Times.
There are other similar testimonies. They are quoted in the book "The Transition" by the doctor Peter Kalinovsky from Australia, who studied 25 thousand cases of resuscitation. American resuscitator Dr. Maurice Roulings, in his book "Beyond Death," tells about the nightmare experienced by the postal worker JR, for whose life doctors fought for over 3 hours. And we won! When he woke up, he said that at first he had fallen into some kind of dark tunnel. Then there was a gloomy crimson space, and in it a huge lake, where instead of water, fire blazed, emitting an intolerable stench. And on the shore - hundreds, thousands, and maybe millions of silent, gloomy people …
And what is characteristic: JR recognized among them some of his former acquaintances …
“I couldn’t even imagine,” JR said, “that you can get out of there. This is worse than the creepiest prison. On the faces of those people it was written that their despair is immeasurable, there is no hope … Heat, not a drop of water anywhere."
Dr. Roulings, who described this case, emphasizes that the pictures of hell made even a hopeless patient fight desperately for life. And although the resuscitation process is extremely painful, and usually patients ask to be left alone, this time it was different: "Go on, doctor, go on, for Christ's sake, I don't want to go there anymore, this is real hell!" shouted J. R.
JR, by the way, was also not a believer, but he assures that it was Jesus who saved him. In some incomprehensible way, the dying man immediately recognized this figure enveloped in light. It is also surprising that a person who had never read or even held Scripture in his hands accurately reproduced the picture of a lake of fire and brimstone, as described in the Bible: it is into such a lake that Satan and his minions should be cast during the Second Coming of Christ …
Civil engineer Hillary, who fell into the water from a height of 15 meters and hit his head twice on the fly on the beams (his body was searched in the water for 40 minutes!), Went to the serpent hell. But that was later. And at first, when the doctor entered the room where Hillary was lying, he saw a bloody body and a small elderly woman who was kneeling and praying: "Lord, do not take him away, this soul has not yet cleansed itself for Eternal Life!.."
Hillary later said that in that eerie cave where he got to, snakes crawled over him, climbed into his ears, nose, causing terrible pain. And there too (as in the story of Professor Storm) there were some invisible evil creatures, terrifying by their mere presence. And then suddenly he saw a flash of light and heard a voice: “Come back, Mrs. K. has prayed for you. Go and live differently!..” Someone's invisible hands raised him. The last thing he felt was the anger of those invisible beings who did not want to let him go!
As it turned out, even Siamese twins have different posthumous addresses. In Prague, for example, heart surgery was performed on brothers, 28-year-old Milos and Stefan Sestak, who had grown together in the chest area, when suddenly both had clinical death. So Milos went to heaven and saw Jesus, and Stefan later said that his soul went in the opposite direction: “I felt that I was leaving my body, and something threw me to the floor. A crack formed there, and I began to fall lower and lower into the depths of the Earth. When my fall stopped, I found myself in a cave, illuminated by hot flames. I was terrified, I wanted to run away, but I could not move, I wanted to scream, but I could not make a sound."
Some descriptions of hell mention a narrow bridge over which the souls of the dead must pass. Moreover, the most weighed down by sins are torn off the bridge and fall into the fiery abyss boiling below. In the stories, there are references to violent winds, now chilling, then burning, or about indomitable rains, hail, snow. It is curious that sometimes even the flora and fauna of hell are remembered - these are, for example, plants completely covered with thorns sharper than knives and dotted with poisonous fruits, or animals in the form of fierce dogs, snakes, toads, some disgusting insects. And all this stings, bites, pricks, tears to pieces. Unbearable pain and unbearable stench.
If such stories were associated with mentally unstable people or religious fanatics, one would assume that all these are hallucinations or just a figment of a sick imagination. But no. Sometimes such confessions come from a sober, highly educated, mentally perfectly normal person.
The conclusion suggests itself. Specialists are mistaken who invariably paint magnificent pictures of the afterlife. Life “beyond the threshold” is not beautiful for everyone. And although heaven in these stories always looks about the same, everyone has their own hell!
“Interesting newspaper. Magic and mysticism №16 2012
