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

… I saw that I was standing alone in the middle of the room; To my right, surrounded by something in a semicircle, all the medical staff crowded. I was surprised by this group: there was a bunk in the place where it stood. What was it that attracted the attention of these people now, what were they looking at when I was no longer there, when I was standing in the middle of the room? I moved and looked where they were all looking. There, on the bed, I was lying! I don't remember feeling anything like fear at the sight of my double, I was only perplexed: how could it be? I felt myself here, and meanwhile I was there too... I wanted to touch, to take my left hand with my right hand - my hand went through, I tried to grab myself by the waist - my hand went through the body again, as if through empty space... I called for the doctor, but the atmosphere in which I was was not at all suitable for me: it did not perceive or transmit the sounds of my voice, and I realized my complete separation from everyone around me, my strange loneliness, and panic fear seized me. There was really something terrible in that unspeakable loneliness. I looked, and only then did the thought come to me for the first time: has not happened to me what in our language, the language of living people, is defined by the word "death"? This occurred to me because my body lying on the bed had the appearance of a dead man.

Remembering and thinking over my state of mind at that time, I only noticed that my mental faculties acted even then with such amazing energy and rapidity. I saw how the old nurse crossed herself: "Well, the Kingdom of Heaven be to him," and suddenly I saw two Angels. For some reason, I recognized one as a guardian angel, and I did not know the other. Taking me by the arms, the Angels carried me right through the wall from the ward to the street. It was already getting dark, it was snowing big, quiet. I saw it, but I did not feel the cold and in general the change between the room temperature and the outside temperature. Obviously, such things have lost their meaning for my altered "body". We began to climb up quickly. And as we ascended, more and more space opened up before my eyes, and at last it assumed such terrifying proportions that I was seized with fear from the realization of my insignificance before this endless desert... The idea of time had faded from my mind, and I do not know how long we had been climbing upwards, when suddenly I heard at first a vague noise, and then, swimming out from somewhere, a crowd of ugly creatures began to approach us with a cry and a cackling. -Demons! I realized with extraordinary rapidity, and was stunned by some peculiar horror hitherto unknown to me. -Demons! "Oh, how much irony, how much sincere laughter would have been aroused in me only a few days ago if someone reported not only that he had seen demons with his own eyes, but that he admitted their existence as creatures of a certain kind! As befits an educated man at the end of the nineteenth century, by this name I understood bad inclinations, passions in man, which is why this word itself had for me the meaning not of a name, but of a term defining a certain concept. And suddenly this "well-known concept" appeared to me as a living personification! Surrounding us from all sides, the demons with shouts and hubbub demanded that I be given to them, they tried somehow to seize me and snatch me from the hands of the Angels, but, obviously, they did not dare to do this. In the midst of their unimaginable howling and hubbub, which was as repulsive to the ear as they were to the eye, I sometimes caught words and whole phrases. "He is ours, he has renounced God," they suddenly shrieked almost with one voice, and at the same time they rushed at us with such impudence that for a moment all my thoughts froze with fear. "That's a lie!" It's not true! I wanted to shout, coming to my senses, but obliging memory tied my tongue. In some incomprehensible way, I suddenly remembered such a small, insignificant event, moreover, belonging to a bygone era of my youth, which, it seems, I could never remember. (Here the narrator remembered a case when, during conversations on abstract topics, one of his fellow students said: "But why should I believe, when I can equally believe that there is no God? And, perhaps, He does not exist?" To which he replied: "Maybe not"). This accusation, apparently, was the most powerful argument for my destruction for the demons, they seemed to draw from it a new strength for the boldness of attacks on me, and already with a furious roar they circled around us, blocking our further path. I remembered prayer and began to pray, calling for help all the saints whom I knew and whose names came to my mind. But this did not deter my enemies. A miserable ignoramus, a Christian only in name, I almost for the first time remembered the One Who is called the Intercessor of the Christian race. But probably my impulse to Her was hot, probably my soul was so filled with horror, that I barely remembered Her name, when suddenly a kind of white mist appeared on us, which began to quickly cover the ugly host of demons. He hid it from my eyes before it could separate from us. Their roaring and cackling could be heard for a long time, but from the way it gradually weakened and became muffled, I could understand that the terrible chase had left us... Then we entered the realm of light. Light came from everywhere. It was so bright, brighter than the sun. There is light everywhere, and there are no shadows. The light was so bright that I could not see anything; as in darkness. I tried to cover my eyes with my hand, but the light passed freely through my hand. And suddenly, from above, imperiously, but without anger, the words "Not ready" were heard, and my rapid downward movement began. I was returned to the body again. And at the end the Guardian Angel said, "You have heard God's decree. Come in and get ready." Both angels became invisible. There were feelings of embarrassment and coldness and deep sadness for what was lost. I lost consciousness and woke up in the ward on a bed. ... Doctors who observed K. Uexkul reported that all clinical signs of death were present and the state of death lasted 36 hours. "Uexkul K. "An Unbelievable for Many, but a True Incident". (Trinity Leaflet No 58. Sergiev Posad, 1910)

Return from the Dead in Modern Greece

About four years ago, we received a call with a request to commune the Holy Mysteries of an elderly woman, a widow living in the suburbs of Athens. She was an Old Calendarist and, being almost completely bedridden, could not go to church. Although we do not usually perform such services outside the monastery and send people to the parish priest, nevertheless, in this case I had a certain feeling that I had to go, and having prepared the Holy Gifts, I left the monastery. I found the sick woman lying in a poor room: having no means of her own, she depended on the neighbors to bring her food and other necessities. I set down the Holy Gifts and asked her if she wanted to confess anything. She answered: "No, there is nothing on my conscience for the last three years that has not already been confessed, but there is one old sin that I would like to tell you about, although I have confessed it to many priests." I replied that if she had already confessed it, she should not do it again. But she insisted, and this is what she told me. When she was young and had just got married, about 35 years ago, she became pregnant at a time when her family was in a very difficult situation. The rest of the family insisted on an abortion, but she flatly refused. In the end, however, she succumbed to her mother-in-law's threats, and the operation was performed. The medical control of clandestine operations was very primitive, resulting in her contracting a serious infection and dying a few days later without being able to confess her sin. At the moment of her death (which was in the evening) she felt that her soul was separated from her body in the way it is usually described: her soul remained nearby and watched how the body was washed, dressed and placed in the coffin. In the morning, she followed the procession to the church, watched the funeral service and saw the coffin placed in the hearse to be taken to the cemetery. The soul seemed to fly above the body at a low altitude. Suddenly, two "deacons" appeared on the road, as she described, in shining sticharions and oraria. One of them was reading a scroll. As the car approached, one of them raised his hand and the car stopped. The chauffeur got out to see what had happened to the engine, and in the meantime the Angels began to talk among themselves. The one who was holding the scroll, which undoubtedly contained a list of her sins, looked up from his reading and said: "It is a pity that there is a very grave sin in her list, and she is destined for hell, because she did not confess it." "Yes," said the second, "but it's a pity that she should be punished because she didn't want to do it and her family forced her to." "Very well," replied the first, "the only thing that can be done is to send her back so that she can confess her sin and repent of it." At these words, she felt that she was being dragged back into the body, for which she felt indescribable disgust and disgust at that moment. A moment later, she woke up and began knocking from inside the coffin, which was already closed. One can imagine the scene that followed. After listening to her story, which I have given here briefly, I gave her Holy Communion and left, glorifying God, who had granted me to hear this... (Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose). "The Soul After Death". St. Petersburg, 1994).

The Living Dead

In the city of Roslavl, Smolensk province, there lived a poor noblewoman Oknova, who had her own house here. After a long illness, she died; as usual, they washed her and put her in a coffin, and on the third day the assembled priests were already preparing to carry her body from the house to the church, when, to everyone's amazement, she rose from the coffin and sat down: everyone was terrified, and when they were sure that she was alive, they took her out of the coffin and put her back to bed. Her illness did not go away after being revived. The revived one lived for several more years. About this event (which took place in the early 30s of the XIX century) she told the following: "When I was dying, I saw myself lifted up through the air and was presented to some terrible judgment seat (presumably, the toll-house), where I stood before some men of very formidable appearance, before whom a large book was unfolded; They judged me for a very long time: at that time I was in unspeakable terror, so that when I now remember it, I tremble; here they presented many of my deeds, done from my youth, even those that I had completely forgotten and did not consider sinning. By the mercy of God, however, it seemed to me that I had been forgiven in many ways and was already hoping to be acquitted, when one formidable man sternly began to demand an answer from me why I had brought up my son poorly, so that he fell into debauchery and perished from his behavior. With tears and trepidation, I justified myself, explaining my son's disobedience and that he had become corrupt when he was already of age. The trial for my son lasted for a long time, then they did not heed either my requests or my cries; Finally, this terrible man, turning to another, said: "Let her go, so that she may repent and weep for her sins properly." Then one of the Angels took me, pushed me, and I felt as if I was descending, and when I came to life, I saw myself lying in the tomb; lighted candles are burning around me, and priests in vestments are singing." "I was not so severely judged for other sins," she said, "as for my son, and this torture was unspeakable. Oknova also told her that her son had become completely depraved, did not live with her, and had no possibility or hope of correcting him.

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