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Preface

Death is one of the most striking facts of human existence. There is no one who can escape it, it is a common lot, the inevitable end of our journey. And hardly anyone could dispute this: probably everyone is sure that death exists. But what death is - the answer to this question for a believer and for an atheist will be completely different. For an unbeliever, death is a natural tragedy conditioned by necessity, the end of all existence, the transition into non-existence. But not so for the Orthodox Christian, who confesses that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Luke 20:38). Faith in the Universal Resurrection, in righteous retribution, in the future eternal life is one of the main foundations of a truly Christian worldview. However, how often, especially in our age, one can hear these surprisingly careless and at the same time such terrible words: "What are you talking about! Who told you that all this would happen, did anyone come back from there?" Remember the Lord's resurrection of the four-day-old Lazarus, the son of the widow of Nain, the daughter of Jairus? But for an unbelieving interlocutor, the Gospel witness is not an argument. An argument is only something that can be seen, which can be verified for oneself. And perhaps that is why it is precisely in our times, times of unbelief and some terrible indifference to everything that belongs to the realm of the spirit, that the Lord so often provides us with such irrefutable evidence of the existence of the world beyond the grave as the return to life of people who have already suffered actual death. People who have received the experience of being different and are able to pass this experience on to others. The resurrection from the dead is a miracle that shocks both the returnee himself and the direct witnesses and eyewitnesses. The man was dead, his body, already lifeless, cooling, was about to rest in the bowels of the earth... And this man is with us again! In the lives of many people, contact with such an obvious reality of the other world produced a radical revolution: it turned atheists into people who were deeply churchly; Believers were awakened from the sleep of negligence, from that spiritual slumber in which, alas, many of us are immersed, forced us to take seriously the preparation for the transition from time to eternity. To the preparation that, in fact, is the meaning of our earthly existence. An "ordinary" modern person rarely thinks about eternity: the temporal and earthly are closer and more desirable. And when, independently of his will, the need comes to sum up the path traveled, it turns out that he is not ready for this. After all, without having remembrance of eternity, how can we prepare for it? And yet this unpreparedness is the most terrible mistake that a person can make in his life. The most terrible because it is impossible to correct it. After death there is no repentance, there is no way to change anything in one's eternal fate, everyone will accept only what he has prepared for himself: his life, his deeds. And therefore, although the Resurrection will be universal, for some it will be a resurrection into eternal life, and for others it will be a terrible resurrection of condemnation (John 5:29). None of us knows its hour, death does not reckon with anything, it takes away the old and the young, the weak and the full of strength, those who are already tired of this life, and those who still want to enjoy it. And that is why it is so important that what the Holy Fathers called the memory of death – the remembrance of one's departure from this life. It is so important that, in the words of St. John of the Ladder, "just as bread is more necessary than any other food, so the thought of death is more necessary than any other work." But it is also extremely important to understand what exactly awaits a person after death and how to prepare for it. For often people, if they do think about death, acquire the most false ideas about it and the ideas that follow it, which are completely at variance with the teaching of the Orthodox Church, and therefore all the more likely to destroy a person. In the West, in particular, in the United States, the phenomenon of death attracts the attention of not only religious and spiritual people, but also people of science. In recent decades, a large number of so-called "thanatologists" have appeared there, conducting research in this previously unknown field for science. The most famous of them are Raymond Moody, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Mikhail Sabom and a number of others. The results of their research removed a kind of "taboo" from the topic of the afterlife, putting the world in the face of an indisputable truth: indeed, with the death of the body, the personality of a person continues to exist. But what are the fruits of the recognition of this fact in the West, in an environment far from Orthodoxy? In other words, what is the attitude of Western man to the question of life and death after returning from the world of other existence? As an answer to this question, we will cite several very characteristic excerpts from the famous book by Raymond Moody "Life after Life": "I believe that this experience (of clinical death - Ed.) determined something in my life. I was still a child, I was only ten years old when this happened, but even now I retain the absolute conviction that there is life after death; I have no doubt about it. I'm not afraid of dying." "When I was a little boy, I used to be afraid of death. I used to wake up at night, cry and throw tantrums... But after this experience, I am not afraid of death. That feeling was gone. I don't feel terrible at funerals anymore." "Now I'm not afraid of dying. This does not mean that death is desired for me or that I want to die right now. I don't want to live there now because I believe I have to live here. But I am not afraid of death, because I know where I will go after I leave this world." "Life is like imprisonment. But in this state, we simply do not understand what kind of prison our body is for us. Death is like liberation, getting out of prison." But for comparison, a completely different example is from the Ladder of St. John. "I will not fail to tell you the story of Hesychius, a monk of Mount Horeb. He had previously led the most negligent life and did not care for his soul in the least; finally, having fallen into a mortal illness, he seemed to be completely dead for an hour.

When he approached death, we, having knocked down the door, entered his cell, and, after much petition, heard only these words: "Forgive me," he said, "he who has acquired the memory of death can never sin." We were amazed to see that in him who had previously been so negligent, such a blissful change and transfiguration suddenly took place"... That attitude towards death, this amazing fearlessness and carelessness, which we see so well in excerpts from Moody's book, is the consequence of a terrible deception, quite natural for people who live in the environment of a world that has completely forgotten the God of the world, or who have a perverse, distorted concept of God. After all, a person moves away from this life not just by moving to some "other dimension". No, he departs in order to stand before the judgment of the God who created him. And therefore, only for a person who has lived according to the commandments of the Gospel, who has completely submitted his will to the Divine will in this life, can death be desired as a rest after labor, as the acquisition of the expected reward. Only he who departs from this life in repentance, with a conscience reconciled with God and neighbor, can not fear death. And for a person who has lived a life without God and outside the Church, a sinful person, death is truly cruel (Psalm 33:22). This is precisely the idea of death and the posthumous fate of man in the Orthodox Church, and it is precisely this nature of the testimonies presented in this collection. It consists of two parts. The first included cases related to the miraculous return of people who had already died to life. Secondly, there are cases in which the very fact of death as such is not contained, but the experience of the afterlife is very vividly presented as a striking and irrefutable evidence of the reality of an existence other than earthly. These cases and events are undoubtedly amazing, supernatural, and deserve all attention in themselves. However, we see the purpose of this publication not only in telling about them once again, but in awakening in readers the remembrance of the transience and transience of this life, of the need to prepare for the transition to eternal life, and if for someone it serves as a reason for reviving such remembrance in oneself, then, probably, this small compilation work was not in vain.

Survivors

Death is one of the most striking facts of human existence. There is no one who can escape it, it is a common lot, the inevitable end of our journey. And hardly anyone could dispute this: probably everyone is sure that death exists. But what death is - the answer to this question for a believer and for an atheist will be completely different. For an unbeliever, death is a natural tragedy conditioned by necessity, the end of all existence, the transition into non-existence. But not so for the Orthodox Christian, who confesses that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Luke 20:38). Faith in the Universal Resurrection, in righteous retribution, in the future eternal life is one of the main foundations of a truly Christian worldview. However, how often, especially in our age, one can hear these surprisingly careless and at the same time such terrible words: "What are you talking about! Who told you that all this would happen, did anyone come back from there?" Remember the Lord's resurrection of the four-day-old Lazarus, the son of the widow of Nain, the daughter of Jairus? But for an unbelieving interlocutor, the Gospel witness is not an argument. An argument is only something that can be seen, which can be verified for oneself. And perhaps that is why it is precisely in our times, times of unbelief and some terrible indifference to everything that belongs to the realm of the spirit, that the Lord so often provides us with such irrefutable evidence of the existence of the world beyond the grave as the return to life of people who have already suffered actual death. People who have received the experience of being different and are able to pass this experience on to others. The resurrection from the dead is a miracle that shocks both the returnee himself and the direct witnesses and eyewitnesses. The man was dead, his body, already lifeless, cooling, was about to rest in the bowels of the earth... And this man is with us again! In the lives of many people, contact with such an obvious reality of the other world produced a radical revolution: it turned atheists into people who were deeply churchly; Believers were awakened from the sleep of negligence, from that spiritual slumber in which, alas, many of us are immersed, forced us to take seriously the preparation for the transition from time to eternity. To the preparation that, in fact, is the meaning of our earthly existence. An "ordinary" modern person rarely thinks about eternity: the temporal and earthly are closer and more desirable. And when, independently of his will, the need comes to sum up the path traveled, it turns out that he is not ready for this. After all, without having remembrance of eternity, how can we prepare for it? And yet this unpreparedness is the most terrible mistake that a person can make in his life. The most terrible because it is impossible to correct it. After death there is no repentance, there is no way to change anything in one's eternal fate, everyone will accept only what he has prepared for himself: his life, his deeds. And therefore, although the Resurrection will be universal, for some it will be a resurrection into eternal life, and for others it will be a terrible resurrection of condemnation (John 5:29). None of us knows its hour, death does not reckon with anything, it takes away the old and the young, the weak and the full of strength, those who are already tired of this life, and those who still want to enjoy it. And that is why it is so important that what the Holy Fathers called the memory of death – the remembrance of one's departure from this life. It is so important that, in the words of St. John of the Ladder, "just as bread is more necessary than any other food, so the thought of death is more necessary than any other work." But it is also extremely important to understand what exactly awaits a person after death and how to prepare for it. For often people, if they do think about death, acquire the most false ideas about it and the ideas that follow it, which are completely at variance with the teaching of the Orthodox Church, and therefore all the more likely to destroy a person. In the West, in particular, in the United States, the phenomenon of death attracts the attention of not only religious and spiritual people, but also people of science. In recent decades, a large number of so-called "thanatologists" have appeared there, conducting research in this previously unknown field for science. The most famous of them are Raymond Moody, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Mikhail Sabom and a number of others. The results of their research removed a kind of "taboo" from the topic of the afterlife, putting the world in the face of an indisputable truth: indeed, with the death of the body, the personality of a person continues to exist. But what are the fruits of the recognition of this fact in the West, in an environment far from Orthodoxy? In other words, what is the attitude of Western man to the question of life and death after returning from the world of other existence? As an answer to this question, we will cite several very characteristic excerpts from the famous book by Raymond Moody "Life after Life": "I believe that this experience (of clinical death - Ed.) determined something in my life. I was still a child, I was only ten years old when this happened, but even now I retain the absolute conviction that there is life after death; I have no doubt about it. I'm not afraid of dying." "When I was a little boy, I used to be afraid of death. I used to wake up at night, cry and throw tantrums... But after this experience, I am not afraid of death. That feeling was gone. I don't feel terrible at funerals anymore." "Now I'm not afraid of dying. This does not mean that death is desired for me or that I want to die right now. I don't want to live there now because I believe I have to live here. But I am not afraid of death, because I know where I will go after I leave this world." "Life is like imprisonment. But in this state, we simply do not understand what kind of prison our body is for us. Death is like liberation, getting out of prison." But for comparison, a completely different example is from the Ladder of St. John. "I will not fail to tell you the story of Hesychius, a monk of Mount Horeb. He had previously led the most negligent life and did not care for his soul in the least; finally, having fallen into a mortal illness, he seemed to be completely dead for an hour.

When he approached death, we, having knocked down the door, entered his cell, and, after much petition, heard only these words: "Forgive me," he said, "he who has acquired the memory of death can never sin." We were amazed to see that in him who had previously been so negligent, such a blissful change and transfiguration suddenly took place"... That attitude towards death, this amazing fearlessness and carelessness, which we see so well in excerpts from Moody's book, is the consequence of a terrible deception, quite natural for people who live in the environment of a world that has completely forgotten the God of the world, or who have a perverse, distorted concept of God. After all, a person moves away from this life not just by moving to some "other dimension". No, he departs in order to stand before the judgment of the God who created him. And therefore, only for a person who has lived according to the commandments of the Gospel, who has completely submitted his will to the Divine will in this life, can death be desired as a rest after labor, as the acquisition of the expected reward. Only he who departs from this life in repentance, with a conscience reconciled with God and neighbor, can not fear death. And for a person who has lived a life without God and outside the Church, a sinful person, death is truly cruel (Psalm 33:22). This is precisely the idea of death and the posthumous fate of man in the Orthodox Church, and it is precisely this nature of the testimonies presented in this collection. It consists of two parts. The first included cases related to the miraculous return of people who had already died to life. Secondly, there are cases in which the very fact of death as such is not contained, but the experience of the afterlife is very vividly presented as a striking and irrefutable evidence of the reality of an existence other than earthly. These cases and events are undoubtedly amazing, supernatural, and deserve all attention in themselves. However, we see the purpose of this publication not only in telling about them once again, but in awakening in readers the remembrance of the transience and transience of this life, of the need to prepare for the transition to eternal life, and if for someone it serves as a reason for reviving such remembrance in oneself, then, probably, this small compilation work was not in vain.

An unbelievable for many, but true incident