The other world has been found; life after death exists. Afterlife

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, allowing one 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 invade its domain, even if it is forgivable, as it seems to us, research purposes, we apparently expose ourselves to an unexplored, although intuitively guessed, 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.

Human nature will never be able to accept the fact that immortality is impossible. Moreover, the immortality of the soul is an indisputable fact for many. And more recently, scientists have discovered evidence that physical death is not the absolute end of human existence and that there is still something beyond the boundaries of life.

One can imagine how such a discovery delighted people. After all, death, like birth, is the most mysterious and unknown state of a person. There are a lot of questions associated with them. For example, why a person is born and starts life from scratch, why he dies, etc.

A person throughout his entire adult life has been trying to deceive fate in order to prolong his existence in this world. Humanity is trying to calculate the formula for immortality in order to understand whether the words “death” and “end” are synonymous.

Scientists have found evidence that there is life after death

However, recent research has brought science and religion into one: death is not the end. After all, only beyond life can a person discover a new form of being. Moreover, scientists are sure that every person can remember his past life. And this means that death is not the end, and there, beyond the line, there is another life. Unknown to humanity, but life.

However, if the transmigration of souls exists, it means that a person must remember not only all his previous lives, but also deaths, while not everyone can survive this experience.

The phenomenon of the transfer of consciousness from one physical shell to another has been exciting the minds of mankind for many centuries. The first mentions of reincarnation are found in the Vedas - the oldest sacred scriptures of Hinduism.

According to the Vedas, any living being resides in two material bodies - the gross and the subtle. And they function only due to the presence of the soul in them. When the gross body finally wears out and becomes unusable, the soul leaves it in another - the subtle body. This is death. And when the soul finds a new physical body that is suitable for its mentality, the miracle of birth occurs.

The transition from one body to another, moreover, the transfer of the same physical defects from one life to another, was described in detail by the famous psychiatrist Ian Stevenson. He began studying the mysterious experience of reincarnation back in the sixties of the last century. Stevenson analyzed more than two thousand cases of unique reincarnation in different parts of the planet. While conducting research, the scientist came to a sensational conclusion. It turns out that those who have survived reincarnation will have the same defects in their new incarnations as they had in their previous life. These could be scars or moles, stuttering or another defect.

Incredibly, the scientist’s conclusions can only mean one thing: after death, everyone is destined to be born again, but in a different time. Moreover, a third of the children Stevenson studied had birth defects. Thus, a boy with a rough growth on the back of his head, under hypnosis, remembered that in a past life he was hacked to death with an ax. Stevenson found a family where a man who had been killed with an ax actually once lived. And the nature of his wound was like a pattern for a scar on the boy’s head.

Another child, who seemed to have been born with chopped off fingers, said that he was injured during field work. And again there were people who confirmed to Stevenson that one day a man died in a field from loss of blood when his fingers got caught in a threshing machine.

Thanks to the research of Professor Stevenson, supporters of the theory of transmigration of souls consider reincarnation to be a scientifically proven fact. Moreover, they claim that almost every person is able to view their past lives even in their sleep.

And the state of déjà vu, when suddenly there is a feeling that somewhere this has already happened to a person, may well be a flash of memory of previous lives.

The first scientific explanation that life does not end with the physical death of a person was given by Tsiolkovsky. He argued that absolute death is impossible because the Universe is alive. And Tsiolkovsky described the souls that left their corruptible bodies as indivisible atoms wandering throughout the Universe. This was the first scientific theory about the immortality of the soul, according to which the death of the physical body does not mean the complete disappearance of the consciousness of the deceased person.

But for modern science, belief in the immortality of the soul alone is, of course, not enough. Humanity still does not agree that physical death is invincible, and is strenuously looking for weapons against it.

Proof of life after death for some scientists is the unique experiment of cryonics, where the human body is frozen and kept in liquid nitrogen until techniques are found to restore any damaged cells and tissues in the body. And recent research by scientists proves that such technologies have already been found, although only a small part of these developments is publicly available. The results of the main studies are kept confidential. One could only dream of such technologies ten years ago.

Today, science can already freeze a person in order to revive him at the right moment, creates a controlled model of a robot-Avatar, but he still has no idea how to resettle a soul. This means that at one point humanity may face a huge problem - the creation of soulless machines that will never be able to replace humans.

Therefore, today, scientists are sure, cryonics is the only method for the revival of the human race.

In Russia, only three people used it. They are frozen and awaiting the future, eighteen more have signed a contract for cryopreservation after death.

Scientists began to think that the death of a living organism can be prevented by freezing several centuries ago. The first scientific experiments on freezing animals were carried out back in the seventeenth century, but only three hundred years later, in 1962, the American physicist Robert Ettinger finally promised people what they had dreamed of throughout human history - immortality.

The professor proposed freezing people immediately after death and storing them in this state until science finds a way to resurrect the dead. Then the frozen ones can be thawed and revived. According to scientists, a person will retain absolutely everything, it will still be the same person who was before death. And the same thing will happen to his soul that happens to it in the hospital when the patient is resuscitated.

All that remains is to decide what age to enter in the new citizen’s passport. After all, resurrection can occur either after twenty or after a hundred or two hundred years.

The famous geneticist Gennady Berdyshev suggests that the development of such technologies will take another fifty years. But the scientist has no doubt that immortality is a reality.

Today Gennady Berdyshev has built a pyramid at his dacha, an exact copy of the Egyptian one, but from logs, in which he is going to lose his years. According to Berdyshev, the pyramid is a unique hospital where time stops. Its proportions are strictly calculated according to the ancient formula. Gennady Dmitrievich assures: it is enough to spend fifteen minutes a day inside such a pyramid, and the years will begin to count down.

But the pyramid is not the only ingredient in this eminent scientist’s recipe for longevity. He knows, if not everything, then almost everything about the secrets of youth. Back in 1977, he became one of the initiators of the opening of the Institute of Juvenology in Moscow. Gennady Dmitrievich led a group of Korean doctors who rejuvenated Kim Il Sung. He was even able to extend the life of the Korean leader to ninety-two years.

Just a few centuries ago, life expectancy on Earth, for example in Europe, did not exceed forty years. A modern person lives on average sixty to seventy years, but even this time is catastrophically short. And recently, the opinions of scientists converge: the biological program for a person is to live at least one hundred and twenty years. In this case, it turns out that humanity simply does not live to reach its true old age.

Some experts are confident that the processes occurring in the body at the age of seventy are premature old age. Russian scientists were the first in the world to develop a unique medicine that prolongs life to one hundred and ten or one hundred and twenty years, which means it cures old age. The peptide bioregulators contained in the medicine restore damaged areas of cells, and a person’s biological age increases.

As reincarnation psychologists and therapists say, a person’s lived life is connected with his death. For example, a person who does not believe in God and leads a completely “earthly” life, and therefore is afraid of death, for the most part does not realize that he is dying, and after death he finds himself in a “gray space.”

At the same time, the soul retains the memory of all its past incarnations. And this experience leaves its mark on a new life. And training on memories from past lives helps to understand the causes of failures, problems and illnesses that people often cannot cope with on their own. Experts say that after seeing their mistakes in past lives, people in their present lives begin to be more conscious about their decisions.

Visions from a past life prove that there is a huge information field in the Universe. After all, the law of conservation of energy says that nothing in life disappears anywhere or appears from nothing, but only passes from one state to another.

This means that after death, each of us turns into something like a clot of energy, carrying all the information about past incarnations, which is then again embodied in a new form of life.

And it is quite possible that someday we will be born in another time and in another space. And remembering your past life is useful not only to remember past problems, but also to think about your purpose.

Death is still stronger than life, but under the pressure of scientific developments its defenses are weakening. And who knows, the time may come when death will open the way for us to another - eternal life.

Beautiful fields and forests, rivers and lakes filled with wonderful fish, gardens with wonderful fruits, there are no problems, only happiness and beauty - one of the ideas about life that continues after death on Earth. Many believers describe heaven in this way, into which a person goes without having done much evil during his earthly life. But is there life after death on our planet? Is there proof of life after death? These are quite interesting and deep questions for philosophical reasoning.

Scientific concepts

As is the case with other mystical and religious phenomena, scientists have been able to explain this issue. Also, many researchers consider scientific evidence of life after death, but they do not have a material basis. Only that later.

Life after death (the concept of “afterlife” is also often found) is people’s ideas from a religious and philosophical point of view about life that occurs after a person’s actual existence on Earth. Almost all of these ideas are related to what is in the human body during his life.

Possible afterlife options:

• Life close to God. This is one of the forms of existence of the human soul. Many believers believe that God will resurrect the soul.
• Hell or heaven. The most common concept. This idea exists both in many religions of the world and among most people. After death, a person's soul will go to hell or heaven. The first place is intended for people who sinned during earthly life.

• A new image in a new body. Reincarnation is the scientific definition of human life in new incarnations on the planet. Bird, animal, plant and other forms into which the human soul can move after the death of the material body. Also, some religions provide for life in the human body.

Some religions present evidence of the existence of life after death in other forms, but the most common ones were given above.

Afterlife in Ancient Egypt

The tallest graceful pyramids took decades to build. The ancient Egyptians used technologies that have not yet been fully studied. There are a large number of assumptions about the construction technologies of the Egyptian pyramids, but, unfortunately, not a single scientific point of view has full evidence.

The ancient Egyptians had no evidence of the existence of the soul and life after death. They only believed in this possibility. Therefore, people built pyramids and provided the pharaoh with a wonderful existence in another world. By the way, the Egyptians believed that the afterlife reality was almost identical to the real world.

It should also be noted that, according to the Egyptians, a person in another world cannot move down or up the social ladder. For example, a pharaoh cannot become a simple man, and a simple worker cannot become a king in the kingdom of the dead.

The inhabitants of Egypt mummified the bodies of the dead, and the pharaohs, as mentioned earlier, were placed in huge pyramids. In a special room, subjects and relatives of the deceased ruler placed items that would be necessary for life and rule in

Life after death in Christianity

Ancient Egypt and the creation of the pyramids date back to ancient times, so the evidence of life after death of this ancient people only applies to the Egyptian hieroglyphs that were found on ancient buildings and pyramids as well. Only Christian ideas about this concept existed before and still exist today.

The Last Judgment is a judgment when a person’s soul appears on trial before God. It is God who can determine the future fate of the soul of the deceased - whether he will experience terrible torment and punishment on his deathbed or walk next to God in a beautiful paradise.

What factors influence God's decision?

Throughout his entire earthly life, every person commits actions - good and bad. It is worth saying right away that this is an opinion from a religious and philosophical point of view. It is these earthly actions that the judge looks at during the Last Judgment. We also must not forget about a person’s vital faith in God and in the power of prayers and the church.

As you can see, in Christianity there is also life after death. Proof of this fact exists in the Bible, the church and the opinions of many people who have dedicated their lives to serving the church and, of course, God.

Death in Islam

Islam is no exception in its adherence to the postulate of the existence of an afterlife. As in other religions, a person commits certain actions throughout his life, and how he dies and what kind of life awaits him will depend on them.

If a person committed bad deeds during his existence on Earth, then, of course, a certain punishment awaits him. The beginning of punishment for sins is painful death. Muslims believe that a sinful person will die in agony. Although a person with a pure and bright soul will leave this world with ease and without any problems.

The main proof of life after death is found in the Koran (the holy book of Muslims) and in the teachings of religious people. It is worth immediately noting that Allah (God in Islam) teaches not to be afraid of death, because a believer who does righteous deeds will be rewarded with eternal life.

If in the Christian religion the Lord himself is present at the Last Judgment, then in Islam the decision is made by two angels - Nakir and Munkar. They are interrogating someone who has passed away from earthly life. If a person did not believe and committed sins that he did not atone for during his earthly existence, then he will be punished. A believer is given heaven. If a believer has unexpiated sins behind him, then he will be punished, after which he will be able to go to a beautiful place called heaven. Atheists face terrible torment.

Buddhist and Hindu beliefs about death

In Hinduism, there is no creator who created life on Earth and to whom we need to pray and bow down. The Vedas are sacred texts that replace God. Translated into Russian, “Veda” means “wisdom” and “knowledge”.

The Vedas can also be seen as providing proof of life after death. In this case, the person (to be more precise, the soul) will die and move into new flesh. The spiritual lessons that a person must learn are the reason for constant reincarnation.

In Buddhism, heaven exists, but it does not have one level, as in other religions, but several. At each stage, so to speak, the soul receives the necessary knowledge, wisdom and other positive aspects and moves on.

In both of these religions, hell also exists, but compared to other religious ideas, it is not an eternal punishment for the human soul. There are a large number of myths about how the souls of the dead passed from hell to heaven and began their journey through certain levels.

Views from other world religions

In fact, every religion has its own ideas about the afterlife. At the moment, it is simply impossible to name the exact number of religions, so only the largest and most basic ones were considered above, but interesting evidence of life after death can also be found in them.

It is also worth paying attention to the fact that almost all religions have common features of death and life in heaven and hell.

Nothing disappears without a trace

Death, death, disappearance are not the end. This, if these words are appropriate, is rather the beginning of something, but not the end. As an example, we can take a plum pit, which was spat out by a person who ate the actual fruit (plum).

This bone falls, and it seems that its end has come. Only in reality can it grow, and a beautiful bush will be born, a beautiful plant that will bear fruit and delight others with its beauty and its existence. When this bush dies, for example, it will simply move from one state to another.

What is this example for? Moreover, the death of a person is also not his immediate end. This example can also be seen as evidence of life after death. Expectation and reality, however, can be very different.

Does the soul exist?

Throughout the entire time, we are talking about the existence of the human soul after death, but there was no question about the existence of the soul itself. Maybe she doesn't exist? Therefore, it is worth paying attention to this concept.

In this case, it is worth moving from religious reasoning to the whole world - earth, water, trees, space and everything else - consists of atoms, molecules. Only none of the elements has the ability to feel, reason and develop. If we talk about whether there is life after death, evidence can be taken based on this reasoning.

Of course, we can say that in the human body there are organs that are the causes of all feelings. We must also not forget about the human brain, because it is responsible for the mind and intelligence. In this case, a comparison can be made between a person and a computer. The latter is much smarter, but it is programmed for certain processes. Today, robots have begun to be actively created, but they do not have feelings, although they are made in human likeness. Based on the reasoning, we can talk about the existence of the human soul.

You can also cite the origin of thought as another proof of the above words. This part of human life has no scientific origin. You can study all kinds of sciences for years, decades and centuries and “sculpt” thoughts from all material means, but nothing will come of it. Thought has no material basis.

Scientists have proven that life after death exists

Speaking about the afterlife of a person, you should not pay attention only to reasoning in religion and philosophy, because, in addition to this, there are scientific research and, of course, the necessary results. Many scientists have puzzled and are puzzled to find out what happens to a person after his death.

The Vedas were mentioned above. These scriptures talk about from one body to another. This is exactly the question asked by Ian Stevenson, a famous psychiatrist. It is worth saying right away that his research in the field of reincarnation made a great contribution to the scientific understanding of life after death.

The scientist began to consider life after death, real evidence of which he could find throughout the planet. The psychiatrist was able to review more than 2,000 cases of reincarnation, after which certain conclusions were drawn. When a person is reborn in a different image, all physical defects also remain. If the deceased had certain scars, then they will also be present in the new body. There is necessary evidence for this fact.

During the study, the scientist used hypnosis. And during one session, the boy remembers his death - he was killed with an ax. This feature could be reflected in the new body - the boy who was examined by the scientist had a rough growth on the back of his head. After receiving the necessary information, the psychiatrist begins a search for a family where a person may have been murdered with an ax. And the result did not take long to arrive. Ian managed to find people in whose family, in the recent past, a man was hacked to death with an ax. The nature of the wound was similar to a child's growth.

This is not one example that may indicate that evidence of life after death has been found. Therefore, it is worth considering a few more cases during the research of a psychiatrist.

Another child had a defect on his fingers, as if they had been chopped off. Of course, the scientist became interested in this fact, and for good reason. The boy was able to tell Stevenson that he had lost his fingers during field work. After talking with the child, the search began for eyewitnesses who could explain this phenomenon. After some time, people were found who spoke about the death of a man during field work. This man died as a result of loss of blood. The fingers were chopped off with a thresher.

Considering these circumstances, we can talk about after death. Ian Stevenson was able to provide evidence. After the scientist’s published works, many people began to think about the real existence of the afterlife, which was described by a psychiatrist.

Clinical and real death

Everyone knows that severe injuries can lead to clinical death. In this case, the person’s heart stops, all life processes stop, but oxygen starvation of the organs does not yet cause irreversible consequences. During this process, the body is in a transitional stage between life and death. Clinical death lasts no more than 3-4 minutes (very rarely 5-6 minutes).

People who were able to survive such moments talk about the “tunnel”, about the “white light”. Based on these facts, scientists were able to discover new evidence of life after death. Scientists who studied this phenomenon made the necessary report. In their opinion, consciousness has always existed in the Universe; the death of the material body is not the end for the soul (consciousness).

Cryonics

This word means freezing the body of a person or animal so that in the future it will be possible to revive the deceased. In some cases, not the entire body is subjected to deep cooling, but only the head or brain.

Interesting fact: experiments on freezing animals were carried out back in the 17th century. Only about 300 years later did humanity think more seriously about this method of obtaining immortality.

It is possible that this process will be the answer to the question: “Does life exist after death?” Evidence may be presented in the future, because science does not stand still. But for now, cryonics remains a mystery with hope for development.

Life after death: the latest evidence

One of the latest evidence in this regard was the study of the American theoretical physicist Robert Lantz. Why one of the last? Because this discovery was made in the fall of 2013. What conclusion did the scientist make?

It is worth immediately noting that the scientist is a physicist, so these proofs are based on quantum physics.

From the very beginning, the scientist paid attention to color perception. He cited the blue sky as an example. We are all used to seeing the sky in this color, but in reality everything is different. Why does a person see red as red, green as green, and so on? According to Lantz, it’s all about the brain receptors that are responsible for color perception. If these receptors are affected, the sky can suddenly turn red or green.

Every person is accustomed, as the researcher says, to seeing a mixture of molecules and carbonates. The reason for this perception is our consciousness, but the reality may differ from the general understanding.

Robert Lantz believes that there are parallel universes where all events are synchronous, but at the same time different. Based on this, the death of a person is only a transition from one world to another. As proof, the researcher conducted Jung's experiment. For scientists, this method is proof that light is nothing more than a wave that can be measured.

The essence of the experiment: Lanz passed light through two holes. When the beam passed through an obstacle, it was divided into two parts, but as soon as it was outside the holes, it merged again and became even brighter. In those places where the waves of light did not combine into one beam, they became dimmer.

As a result, Robert Lantz came to the conclusion that it is not the Universe that creates life, but quite the opposite. If life ends on Earth, then, as in the case of light, it continues to exist in another place.

Conclusion

It probably cannot be denied that there is life after death. Facts and evidence, of course, are not one hundred percent, but they exist. As can be seen from the above information, the afterlife exists not only in religion and philosophy, but also in scientific circles.

Living this time, each person can only imagine and think about what will happen to him after death, after the disappearance of his body on this planet. There are a large number of questions about this, many doubts, but no one living at the moment can find the answer he needs. Now we can only enjoy what we have, because life is the happiness of every person, every animal, we need to live it beautifully.

It is best not to think about the afterlife, because the question of the meaning of life is much more interesting and useful. Almost every person can answer this, but this is a completely different topic.

At some point in life, often from a certain age, when relatives and friends pass away, a person tends to ask questions about death and about possible life after death. We have already written materials on this topic, and you can read the answers to some questions.

But it seems that the number of questions is only growing and we want to explore this topic a little deeper.

Life is eternal

In this article we will not give arguments for and against the existence of life after death. We will proceed from the fact that life exists after the death of the body.

Over the past 50–70 years, medicine and psychology have accumulated tens of thousands of written evidence and research results that make it possible to lift the veil from this mystery.

It is worth noting that, on the one hand, all recorded cases of post-death experiences or travel differ from each other. But, on the other hand, they all coincide in key points.

Such as

• death is simply a transition from one form of life to another;
• when consciousness leaves the body, it simply goes to other worlds and universes;
• the soul, freed from physical experiences, experiences extraordinary lightness, bliss and heightened all senses;
• feeling of flight;
• spiritual worlds are saturated with light and love;
• in the posthumous world, time and space familiar to humans do not exist;
• consciousness works differently than when living in the body, everything is perceived and grasped almost instantly;
• the eternity of life is realized.

Life after death: recorded real cases and recorded facts

The number of recorded accounts of eyewitnesses who have experienced out-of-body experiences is so great today that they could form a large encyclopedia. And perhaps a small library.

Perhaps the largest number of described cases about life after death can be read in the books of Michael Newton, Ian Stevenson, Raymond Moody, Robert Monroe and Edgar Cayce.

Several thousand transcribed audio recordings of regressive hypnosis sessions about the life of the soul between incarnations can only be found in the books of Michael Newton.

Michael Newton began using regression hypnosis to treat his patients, especially those for whom traditional medicine and psychology could no longer help.

At first, he was surprised to discover that many serious problems in life, including patients’ health, had their causes in past lives.

After several decades of research, Newton not only developed a mechanism for treating complex physical and psychological injuries that began in past incarnations, but also collected the largest amount of evidence to date for the existence of life after death.

Michael Newton's first book, Journeys of the Soul, was released in 1994, followed by several more books dealing with life in the spirit worlds.

These books describe not only the mechanism of the soul’s transition from one life to another, but also how we choose our birth, our parents, loved ones, friends, trials and circumstances of life.

In one of the forewords to his book, Michael Newton wrote: “We are all about to return home. Where only pure, unconditional love, compassion and harmony exist side by side. You need to understand that you are currently in school, the Earth school, and when the training is over, this loving harmony is waiting for you. It is important to remember that every experience you have during your current life contributes to your personal, spiritual growth. No matter when or how your training ends, you will return home to the unconditional love that is always available and waiting for us all.”

But the main thing is that Newton not only collected the largest amount of detailed evidence, he also developed a tool that allows anyone to gain their own experience.

Today, regressive hypnosis is also represented in Russia, and if you want to resolve your doubts about the existence of an immortal soul, now you have the opportunity to check it for yourself.

To do this, just find the contacts of a specialist in regressive hypnosis on the Internet. However, take the time to read the reviews to avoid unpleasant disappointment.

Today, books are not the only source of information about life after death. Films and TV series are being made on this topic.

One of the most famous films on this topic, based on real events, “Heaven is for Real” 2014. The film was based on the book “Heaven is Real” by Todd Burpo.

Still from the film “Heaven is for Real”

A book about the story of a 4-year-old boy who experienced clinical death during surgery, went to heaven and returned back, written by his father.

This story is amazing in its details. While out of his body, 4-year-old baby Kilton clearly saw what the doctors and his parents were doing. Which exactly corresponded to what was actually happening.

Kilton describes the heavens and their inhabitants in great detail, although his heart only stopped for a few minutes. During his stay in heaven, the boy learns such details about the life of the family that, according to his father’s assurances, he could not have known, if only because of his age.

The child, during his out-of-body journey, saw dead relatives, angels, Jesus and even the Virgin Mary, apparently due to his Catholic upbringing. The boy observed the past and the near future.

The events described in the book forced Father Kilton to completely reconsider his views on life, death and what awaits us after death.

Interesting cases and evidence of eternal life

An interesting incident happened several years ago with our compatriot Vladimir Efremov.

Vladimir Grigorievich experienced a spontaneous exit from the body due to cardiac arrest. In a word, Vladimir Grigorievich experienced clinical death in February 2014, which he told his relatives and colleagues about in every detail.

And it seemed like there was one more case confirming the presence of an otherworldly life. But the fact is that Vladimir Efremov is not just an ordinary person, not a psychic, but a scientist with an impeccable reputation in his circles.

And according to Vladimir Grigorievich himself, before he experienced clinical death, he considered himself an atheist and perceived stories about the afterlife as the dope of religion. He devoted most of his professional life to the development of rocket systems and space engines.

Therefore, for Efremov himself, the experience of contact with the afterlife was very unexpected, but it largely changed his views on the nature of reality.

It is noteworthy that in his experience there is also light, serenity, extraordinary clarity of perception, a pipe (tunnel) and no sense of time and space.

But, since Vladimir Efremov is a scientist, designer of aircraft and spacecraft, he gives a very interesting description of the world in which his consciousness found itself. He explains it in physical and mathematical concepts, which are unusually far from religious ideas.

He notes that a person in the afterlife sees what he wants to see, which is why there are so many differences in the descriptions. Despite his previous atheism, Vladimir Grigorievich noted that the presence of God was felt everywhere.

There was no visible form of God, but his presence was undeniable. Later, Efremov even gave a presentation on this topic to his colleagues. Listen to the story of the eyewitness himself.

Dalai Lama

One of the greatest proofs of eternal life is known to many, but few have thought about it. Nobel Peace Prize laureate, spiritual leader of Tibet Dalai Lama XIV, is the 14th incarnation of the consciousness (soul) of the 1st Dalai Lama.

But they began the tradition of reincarnation of the main spiritual leader, to preserve the purity of knowledge even earlier. In the Tibetan Kagyu lineage, the highest reincarnated Lama is called Karmapa. And now the Karmapa is experiencing his 17th incarnation.

The famous film “Little Buddha” was made based on the story of the death of the 16th Karmapa and the search for the child into whom he would be reborn.

In the traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, in general, the practice of repeated incarnations is very widespread. But it is especially widely known in Tibetan Buddhism.

It is not only the supreme Lamas, such as the Dalai Lama or the Karmapa, who are reborn. After death, almost without interruption, their closest disciples also come to a new human body, whose task is to recognize the soul of the Lama in the child.

There is a whole ritual of recognition, including recognition among many personal belongings from a previous incarnation. And everyone is free to decide for themselves whether they believe or not in these stories.

But in the political life of the world, some are inclined to take this seriously.

Thus, the new reincarnation of the Dalai Lama is always recognized by the Pancha Lama, who, in turn, is also reborn after each death. It is the Pancha Lama who finally confirms that the child is the embodiment of the consciousness of the Dalai Lama.

And it so happened that the current Pancha Lama is still a child and lives in China. Moreover, he cannot leave this country, because the Chinese government needs him so that without their participation it would not be possible to determine the new incarnation of the Dalai Lama.

Therefore, in the past few years, the spiritual leader of Tibet sometimes jokes and says that he may no longer incarnate or incarnate in a female body. You can, of course, argue that these are Buddhists and they have such beliefs and this is not evidence. But it seems that some heads of state perceive this differently.

Bali - “Island of the Gods”

Another interesting fact takes place in Indonesia, on the Hindu island of Bali. In Hinduism, the theory of reincarnation is key and the islanders deeply believe in it. They believe so strongly that during the cremation of the body, the relatives of the deceased ask the gods to allow the soul, if it wants to be born again on earth, to be born again in Bali.

Which is quite understandable, the island lives up to its name “Island of the Gods”. Moreover, if the family of the deceased is wealthy, she is asked to return to the family.

When a child reaches 3 years of age, there is a tradition of taking him to a special clergyman who has the ability to determine which soul has come into this body. And sometimes it turns out to be the soul of a great-grandmother or uncle. And the existence of the entire island, practically a small state, is determined by these beliefs.

Modern science's view of life after death

Science's views on death and life have changed greatly over the past 50–70 years, largely due to the development of quantum physics and biology. In recent decades, scientists have come closer than ever before to understanding what happens to consciousness after life leaves the body.

If 100 years ago science denied the existence of consciousness or soul, today this is already a generally accepted fact, as is the fact that the consciousness of the experimenter influences the results of the experiment.

So does the soul exist, and is Consciousness immortal from a scientific point of view? - Yes

Neuroscientist Christoph Koch in April 2016, at a meeting of scientists with the 14th Dalai Lama, said that the latest theories in brain science consider consciousness as a property that is inherent in everything that exists.

Consciousness is inherent in everything and is present everywhere, just as gravity acts on all objects without exception.

The theory of “Panpsychism”, the theory of a single universal consciousness, has received a second life these days. This theory is present in Buddhism, Greek philosophy and pagan traditions. But for the first time, Panpsychism is supported by science.

Giulio Tononi, the author of the famous modern theory of consciousness “Integrated Information Theory” states the following: “consciousness exists in physical systems in the form of diverse and multilaterally interconnected pieces of information.”

Christopher Koch and Giulio Tononi made a statement that is astonishing for modern science:

"Consciousness is the fundamental quality inherent in reality."

Based on this hypothesis, Koch and Tononi came up with a unit of measurement for consciousness and called it phi. Scientists have already developed a test that measures phi in the human brain.

A magnetic pulse is sent to the human brain and how the signal is measured in the brain's neurons is measured.

The longer and clearer the brain reverberation in response to a magnetic stimulus, the more conscious a person is.

Using this technique, it is possible to determine what state a person is in: awake, asleep or under anesthesia.

This method of measuring consciousness has found widespread use in medicine. The phi level helps to accurately determine whether actual death has occurred or the patient is in a vegetative state.

The test helps to find out at what time consciousness begins to develop in the fetus and how clearly a person is aware of himself in a state of dementia or dementia.

Several proofs of the existence of the soul and its immortality

Here we are again faced with what can be considered proof of the existence of the soul. In court cases, witness testimony is evidence in favor of the innocence and guilt of suspects.

And for most of us, the stories of people, especially loved ones, who have experienced a post-mortem experience or the separation of the soul from the body will be evidence of the presence of a soul. However, it is not a fact that scientists will accept this evidence as such.

Where is the point at which stories and myths become scientifically proven?

Moreover, today we already know that many of the inventions of the human mind that we use now were present exclusively in science fiction works 200–300 years ago.

The simplest example of this is an airplane.

Evidence from psychiatrist Jim Tucker

So let's look at several cases described by psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker as evidence for the existence of the soul. Moreover, what could be a greater proof of the immortality of the soul if not reincarnation or the memory of one’s past incarnations?

Like Ian Stevenson, Jim spent decades researching the issue of reincarnation based on children's memories of past lives.

In his book Life Before Life: A Scientific Study of Children's Memories of Past Lives, he reviewed more than 40 years of reincarnation research at the University of Virginia.

The studies were based on children's exact memories of their past incarnations.

The book, among other things, discusses birthmarks and birth defects that are present in children and correlate with the cause of death in a previous incarnation.

Jim began studying this issue after he encountered quite frequent requests from parents who claimed that their children told very consistent stories about their past lives.

Names, occupations, places of residence and circumstances of death are given. What a surprise it was when some of the stories were confirmed: houses were found in which the children lived in their previous incarnations and graves where they were buried.

There were too many such cases to consider it a coincidence or a hoax. Moreover, in some cases, young children as young as 2-4 years old already possessed skills that they claimed to have mastered in past lives. Here are a few such examples.

Baby Hunter incarnate

Hunter, a 2-year-old boy, told his parents that he was a multiple golf champion. He lived in the United States of America in the mid-30s and his name was Bobby Jones. At the same time, at only two years old, Hunter played golf well.

So good that he was allowed to study in the section, despite the existing age restrictions of 5 years. It is not surprising that the parents decided to have their son checked. They printed out photographs of several competitive golfers and asked the boy to identify himself.

Without hesitation, Hunter pointed to the photograph of Bobby Jones. By the age of seven, memories of his past life began to blur, but the boy still plays golf and has already won several competitions.

Incarnation of James

Another example about the boy James. He was about 2.5 years old when he started talking about his past life and how he died. First, the child began to have nightmares about the plane crash.

But one day James told his mother that he was a military pilot and died in a plane crash during the war with Japan. His plane was shot down near the island of Iota. The boy described in detail how the bomb hit the engine and the plane began to fall into the ocean.

He remembered that in a previous life his name was James Houston, he grew up in Pennsylvania, and his father suffered from alcoholism.

The boy's father turned to the military archives, where it turned out that a pilot named James Houston really existed. He took part in air operations off the islands of Japan during the Second World War. Houston died off the island of Iota, exactly as the child described.

Reincarnation researcher Ian Stevens

The books of another no less famous reincarnation researcher, Ian Stevens, contain about 3 thousand verified and confirmed childhood memories of past incarnations. Unfortunately, his books have not yet been translated into Russian, and are currently only available in English.

His first book was published in 1997 and was entitled "Reincarnation and Stevenson's Biology: Contributions to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects."

In researching this book, two hundred cases of birth defects or birthmarks in children that could not be explained medically or genetically were examined. At the same time, the children themselves explained their origins by events from past lives.

For example, there have been cases of children with irregular or missing fingers. Children with such defects often remembered the circumstances under which these injuries were received, where and at what age. Many of the stories were confirmed by death certificates found later and even stories from living relatives.

There was a boy with moles that were shaped very much like the entry and exit wounds of a bullet wound. The boy himself claimed that he died from a shot in the head. He remembered his name and the house in which he lived.

The deceased's sister was later found and confirmed her brother's name and the fact that he shot himself in the head.

All the thousands and thousands of similar cases recorded today are proof not only of the existence of the soul, but also of its immortality. Moreover, thanks to many years of research by Ian Stevenson, Jim B. Tucker, Michael Newton and others, we know that sometimes no more than 6 years can pass between soul incarnations.

In general, according to the research of Michael Newton, the soul itself chooses how soon and why it wants to incarnate again.

Further proof of the existence of the soul came from the discovery of the atom.

The discovery of the atom and its structure led to the fact that scientists, especially quantum physicists, were forced to admit that at the quantum level everything existing in the universe, absolutely everything, is one.

An atom is 90 percent composed of space (emptiness), which means that all living and nonliving bodies, including the human body, consist of the same space.

It is noteworthy that more and more quantum physicists are now practicing Eastern meditation practices, because, in their opinion, they allow them to experience this fact of unity.

John Hagelin, a famous quantum physicist and popularizer of science, said in one of his interviews that for all quantum physicists, our unity at the subatomic level is a proven fact.

But if you want not just to know this, but to experience it yourself, take up meditation, because it will help you find access to this space of peace and love, which is already present inside everyone, but is simply not realized.

You can call it God, soul or higher mind, the fact of its existence will not change in any way.

Isn’t it possible that mediums, psychics and many creative personalities can connect to this space?

Religious opinions on death

The opinion of all religions about death agrees on one thing - when you die in this world, you are born in another. But the descriptions of other worlds in the Bible, Koran, Kabbalah, Vedas and other religious books differ in accordance with the cultural characteristics of the countries where this or that religion was born.

But taking into account the hypothesis that after death the soul sees those worlds that it is inclined and wants to see, we can conclude that all differences in religious views on life after death are explained precisely by differences in faith and beliefs.

Spiritualism: communication with the departed

It seems that humans have always had a desire to communicate with the dead. Because throughout the existence of human culture, there have been people who have been able to communicate with the spirits of deceased ancestors.

In the Middle Ages, this was done by shamans, priests and sorcerers; in our time, people with such abilities are called mediums or psychics.

If you watch television at least occasionally, you may have come across a television show that shows sessions of communication with the spirits of the deceased.

One of the most famous shows in which communication with the departed is a key theme is “Battle of Psychics” on TNT.

It is difficult to say how real what the viewer sees on the screen is. But one thing is for sure - it is now not difficult to find someone who can help you contact your deceased loved one.

But when choosing a medium, you should take care to obtain proven recommendations. At the same time, you can try to set up this connection yourself.

Yes, not everyone has psychic abilities, but many can develop them. There are often cases when communication with the dead occurs spontaneously.

This usually happens up to 40 days after death, until the time has come for the soul to fly away from the earthly plane. During this period, communication can occur on its own, especially if the deceased has something to tell you and you are emotionally open to such communication.

The answer to the question: “Is there life after death?” - all major world religions give or try to give. And if our ancestors, distant and not so distant, saw life after death as a metaphor for something beautiful or, on the contrary, terrible, then it is quite difficult for modern people to believe in Heaven or Hell described in religious texts. People have become too educated, but not to say that they are smart when it comes to the last line before the unknown.

In March 2015, toddler Gardell Martin fell into an icy creek and was dead for more than an hour and a half. Less than four days later, he left the hospital alive and well. His story is one of those that encourage scientists to reconsider the very meaning of the concept of “death.”

At first it seemed to her that she just had a headache - but like she had never had a headache before.

22-year-old Carla Perez was expecting her second child - she was in her sixth month of pregnancy. At first she was not too scared and decided to lie down, hoping that the headache would go away. But the pain only got worse, and when Perez vomited, she asked her brother to call 911.

Unbearable pain overwhelmed Carla Perez on February 8, 2015, close to midnight. An ambulance transported Carla from her home in Waterloo, Nebraska, to Methodist Women's Hospital in Omaha. There the woman began to lose consciousness, breathing stopped, and doctors inserted a tube into her throat so that oxygen continued to flow to the fetus. A CT scan showed that a massive cerebral hemorrhage created enormous pressure in the woman’s skull.

Perez suffered a stroke, but the fetus, surprisingly, was not harmed; his heart continued to beat confidently and evenly, as if nothing had happened. At about two o'clock in the morning, a repeat tomography showed that intracranial pressure irreversibly deformed the brain stem.

“Seeing this,” says Tiffany Somer-Sheley, a doctor who saw Perez during both her first and second pregnancies, “everyone realized that nothing good could be expected.”

Carla found herself on the precarious line between life and death: her brain stopped functioning without a chance of recovery - in other words, she died, but the vital functions of the body could be maintained artificially, in this case, to allow the 22-week fetus to develop to the stage where it will be able to exist independently.

There are more and more people who, like Carla Perez, are in a borderline state every year, as scientists understand more and more clearly that the “switch” of our existence does not have two on/off positions, but much more, and between white and black there is room for many shades. In the “gray zone” everything is not irrevocable, sometimes it is difficult to determine what life is, and some people cross the last line, but return - and sometimes talk in detail about what they saw on the other side.

“Death is a process, not an instant,” writes resuscitator Sam Parnia in Erasing Death: The heart stops beating, but the organs do not die that very minute. In fact, the doctor writes, they can remain intact for quite a long time, meaning that for a long time "death is completely reversible."

How can one whose name is synonymous with mercilessness be reversible? What is the nature of the transition through this gray area? What happens to our consciousness?

In Seattle, biologist Mark Roth is experimenting with placing animals in artificial suspended animation using chemical compounds that slow their heart rate and metabolism to levels similar to those observed during hibernation. His goal is to make people who have suffered a heart attack “a little immortal” until they overcome the consequences of the crisis that brought them to the brink of life and death.

In Baltimore and Pittsburgh, trauma teams led by surgeon Sam Tisherman are conducting clinical trials in which patients with gunshot and stab wounds are lowered in body temperature to slow bleeding long enough to receive stitches. These doctors use cold for the same purpose that Roth uses chemicals: to temporarily "kill" patients in order to ultimately save their lives.

In Arizona, cryopreservation specialists keep the bodies of more than 130 of their clients frozen - also a form of "border zone." They hope that sometime in the distant future, perhaps a few centuries from now, these people can be thawed and revived, and by then medicine will be able to cure the diseases from which they died.

In India, neuroscientist Richard Davidson studies Buddhist monks who have entered a state known as thukdam, in which biological signs of life disappear but the body appears to remain intact for a week or longer. Davidson is trying to record some activity in the brains of these monks, hoping to find out what happens after the blood circulation stops.

And in New York, Sam Parnia talks excitedly about the possibilities of “delayed resuscitation.” He says cardiopulmonary resuscitation works better than is commonly believed, and under certain conditions—when body temperature is lowered, chest compressions are properly regulated in depth and rhythm, and oxygen is administered slowly to avoid tissue damage—some patients can be brought back to life even after their heart had stopped beating for several hours, and often without long-term negative consequences. Now a doctor is exploring one of the most mysterious aspects of returning from the dead: why do so many people who have experienced clinical death describe how their consciousness was separated from their body? What can these sensations tell us about the nature of the “border zone” and about death itself?

According to Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, the role of oxygen at the border between life and death is highly controversial. “As early as the 1770s, as soon as oxygen was discovered, scientists realized that it was essential for life,” says Roth. - Yes, if you greatly reduce the concentration of oxygen in the air, you can kill the animal. But, paradoxically, if you continue to reduce the concentration to a certain threshold, the animal will live in suspended animation.”

Mark showed how this mechanism works using the example of soil-dwelling roundworms - nematodes, which can live at an oxygen concentration of only 0.5 percent, but die when it is reduced to 0.1 percent. However, if you quickly pass this threshold and continue to reduce the oxygen concentration - to 0.001 percent or even less - the worms fall into a state of suspended animation. In this way, they escape when harsh times come for them - which is reminiscent of animals hibernating for the winter. Deprived of oxygen, creatures fallen into suspended animation seem to be dead, but this is not so: the flame of life still glimmers in them.

Roth attempts to control this condition by injecting test animals with an "elemental reducing agent" - such as iodide salt - which significantly reduces their need for oxygen. He will soon try this method on people, to minimize the damage treatment can cause to patients after a heart attack. The idea is that if iodide salt slows oxygen metabolism, it may help avoid ischemia-reperfusion injury to the myocardium. This type of damage due to excess supply of oxygen-rich blood to areas where there was previously a lack of it occurs as a result of treatments such as balloon angioplasty. In a state of suspended animation, the damaged heart will be able to slowly feed on oxygen coming from the repaired vessel, rather than choke on it.

As a student, Ashley Barnett was involved in a serious car accident on a highway in Texas, far from major cities. Her pelvic bones were crushed, her spleen was ruptured, and she was bleeding. In those moments, Barnett recalls, her mind slipped between two worlds: one in which rescuers extracted her from a crumpled car using a hydraulic tool, where chaos and pain reigned; in the other, a white light shone and there was no pain or fear. A few years later, Ashley was diagnosed with cancer, but thanks to her near-death experience, the young woman was confident that she would live. Today Ashley is a mother of three and counsels accident survivors.

The question of life and death, according to Roth, is a question of movement: from the point of view of biology, the less movement, the longer the life, as a rule. Seeds and spores can live for hundreds and thousands of years - in other words, they are practically immortal. Roth dreams of the day when, using a reducing agent like iodide salt (the first clinical trials will begin soon in Australia), it will be possible to make a person immortal "for a moment" - for that very moment when he needs it most, when his heart is in trouble.

However, this method would not help Carla Perez, whose heart never stopped beating for a second. The day after the horrific results of the CT scan came back, Doctor Somer-Sheley tried to explain to the shocked parents, Modesto and Bertha Jimenez, that their beautiful daughter, a young woman who adored her three-year-old daughter, was surrounded by many friends and loved to dance, had died. brain

It was necessary to overcome the language barrier. The Jimenezes' native language is Spanish, and everything the doctor said had to be translated. But there was another barrier, more complicated than the linguistic one - the very concept of brain death. This term appeared in the late 1960s, when two medical advances coincided: the advent of life-sustaining equipment, which blurred the line between life and death, and advances in organ transplantation, which created the need to make this line as distinct as possible. . Death could not be defined in the old way, only as the cessation of breathing and heartbeat, since artificial respiration machines could maintain both indefinitely. Is the person connected to such a device alive or dead? If he is disabled, when is it morally right to remove his organs to transplant them into someone else? And if the transplanted heart beats again in the other breast, is it possible to assume that the donor was truly dead when his heart was cut out?

To discuss these delicate and difficult issues, a commission was convened at Harvard in 1968, which formulated two definitions of death: the traditional, cardiopulmonary, and a new one, based on neurological criteria. Among these criteria that are used today to determine the fact of brain death, there are three most important: coma, or complete and sustained absence of consciousness, apnea, or the inability to breathe without a ventilator, and the absence of brain stem reflexes, which is determined by simple tests: you can rinse the patient's ears with cold water and check whether the eyes move, or squeeze the nail phalanges with a hard object and see if the facial muscles react, or apply pressure to the throat and bronchi, trying to evoke a cough reflex.

This is all quite simple and yet counterintuitive. “Patients who are brain dead do not appear dead,” James Bernath, a neurologist at Dartmouth Medical College, wrote in the American Journal of Bioethics in 2014. “It contradicts our life experience to call a patient dead whose heart continues to beat, blood flows through the vessels and internal organs function.” The article, which aims to clarify and reinforce the concept of brain death, appeared just as the medical stories of two patients were widely discussed in the American press. The first, Jahi McMath, a teenager from California, suffered acute oxygen deprivation during tonsillectomy, and her parents refused to accept the diagnosis of brain death. The other, Marlyse Muñoz, was a pregnant woman whose case was fundamentally different from Carla Perez's. Relatives did not want her body to be artificially kept alive, but the hospital administration did not listen to their demand, because they believed that Texas law obliges doctors to preserve the life of the fetus. (The court later ruled in favor of the relatives.)

...Two days after Carla Perez's stroke, her parents, along with the father of their unborn child, arrived at Methodist Hospital. There, in the conference room, 26 clinic employees were waiting for them - neurologists, palliative care and ethicists, nurses, priests, social workers. The parents listened intently to the words of the translator, who explained to them that the tests showed that their daughter’s brain had stopped functioning. They learned that the hospital was offering to keep Perez alive until her fetus was at least 24 weeks old—that is, until it had at least a 50-50 chance of surviving outside the womb. With luck, doctors said, they It will be possible to maintain vital functions even longer, increasing the likelihood that the baby will be born with each passing week.

Perhaps at that moment Modesto Jimenez remembered a conversation with Tiffany Somer-Sheley - the only one in the entire hospital who knew Carla as a living, laughing, loving woman. The night before, Modesto had taken Tiffany aside and quietly asked just one question.

“No,” Dr. Somer-Sheley replied. “Most likely, your daughter will never wake up.” These were perhaps the most difficult words of her life. “As a physician, I understood that brain death is death,” she says. “From a medical point of view, Carla was already dead at that moment.” But looking at the patient lying in the intensive care unit, Tiffany felt that it was almost as difficult for her to believe in this indisputable fact as it was for the parents of the deceased. Perez looked as if she had just undergone successful surgery: her skin was warm, her chest was rising and falling, and the fetus in her stomach was moving - apparently completely healthy. Then, in a crowded conference room, Carla's parents told the doctors: yes , they realize that their daughter is brain dead and she will never wake up. But they added that they would pray for un milagro - a miracle. Just in case.

During a family picnic on the shores of Sleepy Hollow Lake in upstate New York, Tony Kikoria, an orthopedic surgeon, tried to call his mother. A thunderstorm began, and lightning struck the phone and passed through Tony's head. His heart stopped. Kikoria recalls feeling himself leaving his own body and moving through the walls towards a bluish-white light to connect with God. Returning to life, he suddenly felt drawn to playing the piano and began recording melodies that seemed to “download” into his brain. In the end, Tony came to the conclusion that his life was spared so that he could broadcast “music from heaven” to the world.

The return of a person from the dead - what is this if not a miracle? And, I must say, such miracles sometimes happen in medicine.

The Martins know this first hand. Last spring, their youngest son Gardell visited the kingdom of the dead when he fell into an icy stream. The large Martin family - husband, wife and seven children - lives in rural Pennsylvania, where the family owns a large plot of land. Children love to explore the area. On a warm day in March 2015, two older boys went for a walk and took Gardell, who was not yet two years old, with them. The kid slipped and fell into a stream flowing a hundred meters from the house. Noticing the disappearance of their brother, the frightened boys tried for some time to find him themselves. As time went…

By the time the rescue team reached Gardell (a neighbor pulled him out of the water), the baby's heart had not been beating for at least thirty-five minutes. The rescuers began performing external cardiac massage and did not stop for a minute throughout the 16 kilometers that separated them from the nearest Evangelical Community Hospital. The boy’s heart failed to start, and his body temperature dropped to 25 °C. Doctors prepared Gardell to be transported by helicopter to Geisinger Medical Center, 29 kilometers away, in Danville. The heart still didn't beat.

“He showed no signs of life,” recalls Richard Lambert, a pediatrician in charge of administering pain medications at the medical center and a member of the resuscitation team waiting for the plane. “He looked like... Well, in general, his skin was darkened, his lips were blue...” Lambert's voice fades as he recalls this terrible moment. He knew that children who drowned in icy water sometimes came back to life, but he had never heard of this happening to babies who had not shown signs of life for so long. To make matters worse, the boy's blood pH level was critically low - a sure sign of imminent organ failure.

...The resuscitator on duty turned to Lambert and his colleague Frank Maffei, director of the intensive care unit at the Geisinger Center Children's Hospital: maybe it was time to give up trying to revive the boy? But neither Lambert nor Maffei wanted to give up. The circumstances were generally suitable for a successful return from the dead. The water was cold, the child was small, attempts to resuscitate the boy began a few minutes after he drowned, and have not stopped since then. “Let's continue, just a little longer,” they told their colleagues.

And they continued. Another 10 minutes, another 20 minutes, then another 25. By this time, Gardell wasn't breathing, and his heart hadn't beat for over an hour and a half. “A limp, cold body with no signs of life,” Lambert recalls. However, the resuscitation team continued to work and monitor the boy’s condition. The doctors performing external cardiac massage changed every two minutes - a very difficult procedure if performed correctly, even when the patient has such a tiny chest. Meanwhile, other intensivists inserted catheters into Gardell's femoral and jugular veins, stomach and bladder, pouring warm fluids into them to gradually raise his body temperature. But this seemed to be of no use.

Rather than stop resuscitation completely, Lambert and Maffei decided to move Gardell to surgery to put him on a heart-lung machine. This most drastic method of warming the body was a last ditch attempt to get the baby's heart beating again. After treating his hands before the operation, the doctors checked his pulse again.

Incredible: he appeared! I felt a heartbeat, weak at first, but even, without the characteristic rhythm disturbances that sometimes appear after a prolonged cardiac arrest. Just three and a half days later, Gardell left the hospital with his family offering prayers to heaven. His legs barely obeyed him, but otherwise the boy felt great.

After a head-on collision between two cars, student Tricia Baker ended up in a hospital in Austin, Texas, with a broken spine and severe blood loss. When the operation began, Trisha felt like she was hanging from the ceiling. She clearly saw a straight line on the monitor - her heart had stopped beating. Baker then found herself in a hospital hallway, where her grief-stricken stepfather was buying a candy bar from a vending machine; it was this detail that subsequently convinced the girl that her movements were not a hallucination. Today, Trisha teaches creative writing and is confident that the spirits that accompanied her on the other side of death guide her in life.

Gardell is too young to describe what he felt while he was dead for 101 minutes. But sometimes people saved thanks to persistent and high-quality resuscitation, returning to life, talk about what they saw, and their stories are quite specific - and frighteningly similar to one another. These stories have been the subject of scientific study numerous times, most recently as part of Project AWARE, led by Sam Parnia, director of critical care research at Stony Brook University. Since 2008, Parnia and his colleagues have reviewed 2,060 cases of cardiac arrest that occurred in 15 American, British and Australian hospitals. In 330 cases, patients survived, and 140 survivors were interviewed. In turn, 45 of them reported that they were in some form of consciousness during resuscitation procedures.

Although most could not remember the details of what they felt, others' stories were similar to those found in best-selling books like Heaven is for Real: time sped up or slowed down (27 people), they experienced peace (22), a separation of mind from body (13), joy (9), saw a bright light or a golden flash (7). Some (the exact number is not given) reported unpleasant sensations: they were scared, it seemed that they were drowning or that they were being carried somewhere deep under water, and one person saw “people in coffins that were buried vertically in the ground.”

Parnia and his co-authors wrote in the medical journal Resuscitation that their study provides an opportunity to advance our understanding of the variety of mental experiences that are likely to accompany death after circulatory arrest. According to the authors, the next step is to examine whether and how these experiences, which most researchers call near-death experiences (Parnia prefers the term "after-death experiences"), affect surviving patients after recovery. he has cognitive problems or post-traumatic stress. What the AWARE team didn't explore was the typical effect of a near-death experience—an increased sense that your life has meaning and significance.

Survivors of clinical death often talk about this feeling - and some even write entire books. Mary Neal, an orthopedic surgeon from Wyoming, mentioned this effect when speaking to a large audience at the Rethinking Death symposium at the New York Academy of Sciences in 2013. Neal, author of To Heaven and Back, recounted how she went to the bottom while kayaking down a mountain river in Chile 14 years ago. At that moment, Mary felt her soul separating from her body and flying over the river. Mary recalls: “I walked along an amazingly beautiful road leading to a majestic building with a dome, from where I knew for sure there would be no return, and I couldn’t wait to get to it as soon as possible.”

Mary was at that moment able to analyze how strange all her sensations were, she remembers wondering how long she had been under water (at least 30 minutes, as she later learned), and consoled herself with the fact that her husband and children would be good without it. The woman then felt her body being pulled out of the kayak, felt both her knee joints were broken and saw CPR being administered to her. She heard one of the rescuers calling her: “Come back, come back!” Neal recalled that upon hearing this voice, she felt “extreme irritation.”

Kevin Nelson, a neurologist at the University of Kentucky who took part in the discussion, was skeptical - not about Neal's memories, which he recognized as vivid and genuine, but about their interpretation. “This is not the feeling of a dead person,” Nelson said during the discussion, also objecting to Parnia's point. “When a person experiences such sensations, his brain is very alive and very active.” According to Nelson, what Neal felt could be explained by the so-called “REM sleep invasion,” when the same brain activity that is characteristic of him during dreams for some reason begins to manifest itself in some other circumstances not related to sleep - for example, during sudden oxygen deprivation. Nelson believes that near-death experiences and the feeling of separation of the soul from the body are caused not by dying, but by hypoxia (oxygen deficiency) - that is, loss of consciousness, but not life itself.

There are other psychological explanations for near-death experiences. At the University of Michigan, a team of researchers led by Jimo Borjigin measured brain waves of electromagnetic radiation after cardiac arrest in nine rats. In all cases, high-frequency gamma waves (those that scientists associate with mental activity) became stronger - and even clearer and more orderly than during normal wakefulness. Perhaps, the researchers write, this is a near-death experience - increased activity of consciousness that occurs during the transition period before final death?

Even more questions arise when studying the already mentioned tukdam - a state when a Buddhist monk dies, but for another week or even more his body does not show signs of decomposition. Is he still conscious? Is he dead or alive? Richard Davis of the University of Wisconsin has been studying the neurological aspects of meditation for many years. All these questions have been on his mind for a long time - especially after he had a chance to see a monk in a tukdam at the Deer Park Buddhist monastery in Wisconsin.

“If I happened to walk into that room, I would think he was just sitting there, deep in meditation,” Davidson says, a note of awe in his voice over the phone. “His skin looked absolutely normal, without the slightest sign of decomposition.” The sensation caused by the close proximity of this dead man led Davidson to begin researching the phenomenon of tukdam. He brought the necessary medical equipment (electroencephalographs, stethoscopes, etc.) to two field research sites in India and trained a team of 12 Tibetan doctors to examine the monks (starting when they were clearly alive) to find out whether their some activity in the brain after death.

“Many monks probably go into a state of meditation before they die, and it somehow persists after death,” says Richard Davidson. “But how this happens and how it can be explained eludes our everyday understanding.”

Davidson's research, based on the principles of European science, aims to achieve a different, more subtle understanding of the problem, an understanding that could shed light not only on what happens to the monks in tukdam, but also on any person who crosses the border between life and death.

Typically, decomposition begins almost immediately after death. When the brain stops functioning, it loses the ability to maintain the balance of all other body systems. So in order for Carla Perez to continue carrying her baby after her brain stopped working, a team of more than 100 doctors, nurses and other hospital staff had to act as a kind of conductor. They monitored blood pressure, kidney function and electrolyte balance devices around the clock, and constantly made changes to the fluids given to the patient through the catheters.

But even performing the functions of Perez’s brain-dead body, the doctors could not perceive her as dead. Everyone, without exception, treated her as if she were in a deep coma, and upon entering the ward they greeted her, calling the patient by name, and when leaving they said goodbye.

They did this partly out of respect for Perez's family's feelings—the doctors didn't want to give the impression that they were treating her like a "baby container." But sometimes their behavior went beyond ordinary politeness, and it became clear that the people caring for Perez actually treated her as if she were alive.

Todd Lovgren, one of the leaders of this medical team, knows what it's like to lose a child - his daughter, who died in early childhood, the eldest of his five children, would have turned twelve. “I wouldn’t respect myself if I didn’t treat Carla like a real person,” he told me. “I saw a young woman with nail polish, her mother combing her hair, her hands and toes warm... Whether her brain was functioning or not, I don’t think she stopped being human.”

Speaking more as a father than as a doctor, Lovgren admits that he felt as if something of Perez's personality was still present in the hospital bed - even though, after a follow-up CT scan, he knew that the woman's brain was not just not functioning ; large portions of it began to die and disintegrate (However, the doctor did not test for the last sign of brain death, apnea, because he feared that by disconnecting Perez from the ventilator for even a few minutes, he could harm the fetus).

On February 18, ten days after Perez's stroke, it was discovered that her blood had stopped clotting normally. It became clear: dying brain tissue penetrates the circulatory system - another evidence in favor of the fact that she will not recover. By then, the fetus was 24 weeks old, so doctors decided to transfer Perez from the main campus back to Methodist Hospital's obstetrics and gynecology department. They managed to temporarily overcome the problem of blood clotting, but they were ready to perform a caesarean section at any moment - as soon as it became clear that they could not delay, as soon as even the semblance of life that they managed to maintain began to disappear.

According to Sam Parnia, death is, in principle, reversible. Cells inside the human body, he says, usually don't die immediately with the body: some cells and organs can remain viable for several hours and maybe even days. The question of when a person can be declared dead is sometimes decided according to the personal views of the physician. During his years as a student, Parnia says, cardiac massage was stopped after five to ten minutes, believing that after this time the brain would still be irreparably damaged.

However, resuscitation scientists have found ways to prevent death of the brain and other organs even after cardiac arrest. They know that lowering body temperature contributes to this: ice water helped Gardell Martin, and in some intensive care units, the patient is specially cooled each time before starting a cardiac massage. Scientists also know how important persistence and perseverance are.

Sam Parnia compares critical care to aeronautics. Throughout human history, it seemed that people would never fly, and yet in 1903 the Wright brothers took to the skies in their airplane. It's amazing, Parnia notes, that it took just 66 years from that first 12-second flight to the moon landing. He believes that similar successes can be achieved in intensive care medicine. As for the resurrection from the dead, the scientist thinks, here we are still at the stage of the first airplane of the Wright brothers.

And yet doctors are already able to win life from death in amazing, hope-giving ways. One such miracle occurred in Nebraska on Easter Eve, around noon on April 4, 2015, when a boy named Angel Perez was born by Caesarean section at Methodist Women's Hospital. Angel was born because doctors were able to keep his brain-dead mother alive for 54 days, long enough for the fetus to develop into a small but normal—astonishingly normal—newborn weighing 1,300 grams. This child turned out to be the miracle his grandparents had prayed for.