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PREFACE

The author of the book "Transition" - Pyotr Petrovich Kalinovsky found himself with his parents in Germany as a child in the 20s. He received a medical education. He is a surgeon by profession. After the Second World War, P. P. Kalinovsky lived and worked in Australia. He is Orthodox, he belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. It is noteworthy that P. P. Kalinovsky combines a scientist and a Christian in one person.

The first thing I would like to say about Dr. Kalinovsky's book is that it was written in a very kind way, by a man of deep faith and genuine experience of Christian spiritual life. Referring to a variety of authors, citing numerous excerpts and quotations, the author conveys what unites all the sources used - peace and love, which faith in Jesus Christ brings to every person.

The book is devoted to the most important question for a person - the question of death. There is no doubt that a person's way of life depends on what a person thinks about death: moral values, actions, character and much, much more. In our society, the most common attitude to death is: "It will come someday anyway, so there is no need to think about it!" "The end is the crown of the whole business," says a folk proverb. If you do not think about the result, then the very content of life becomes thoughtless, not directed to anything.

So, we are talking about the facts of the continuation of the existence of the personality, the human "I" after the death of our physical body. These facts include, first of all, the testimonies of people who survived clinical death and returned "back" either spontaneously or, in most cases, after resuscitation.

In the early 1960s, I happened to know a man who had a similar experience and testified to being out of the body, who saw his own body from the outside, and who returned to our world with the full conviction that the soul of man continues to live after he leaves the body. The experience turned this man from indifferent to religion into a deeply religious Orthodox Christian.

Many years later, in 1977, when I had already left biology and served in the Church, I read that a certain Raymond Moody had written a book in which he summarized the experiences of 150 people who survived clinical death and testified to the continuation of life after the death of the body. The book was called "Life After Life". It told about an experience very similar to the one that my acquaintance had experienced. Soon I managed to get hold of this book, and I gave it to our famous geneticist Nikolai Vladimirovich Timofeev-Ressovsky, with whom I was well acquainted, in order to enlist the opinion of this great biologist. Nikolai Vladimirovich fully approved the book and warmly supported the idea of its translation into Russian. Soon I made a translation and began to give it to my friends to read. (The book was quickly sold out in samizdat.)

Of course, in the late 70s, it was difficult to expect that this amazing data would be able to reach our mass readership through state publishing houses. The fact that this has finally become possible is perhaps one of the most important fruits of perestroika.

If we talk about the phenomenon of life after life itself, then it is typical for our materialistic reader, who is skeptical, to assume a variety of mechanisms that explain the amazing facts that accompany clinical death. I will not here expound the arguments in favor of the post-mortem existence of the human personality—the reader will find it in this book—except to say that none of the objections can be considered satisfactory, and the conviction of the people who have lived through this experience is quite unshakable.

Doubts about the reality of post-mortem existence are quite natural. Man is made in such a way that he perceives most fully only what he himself experiences, only what he encounters daily, and in the interpretation that is accepted by those around him. The conviction in the existence of only the visible world, which overwhelms us with its obviousness, the bustle and din of modern, especially urban, life, can hardly be subject to even the slightest doubt simply because there is no place or time left in our life for the experience of the other world. When we encounter as yet inexplicable phenomena, we are ready to accept any superficial explanation in order not to abandon the usual worldview, because we instinctively feel that in this case we will have to revise too much in our life, change too much.

Man is an extremely conservative creature. Any new scientific theory is accepted no earlier than 10-20 years after its appearance. Nor is there any teaching from the abundant evidence that even scientific truths are in complete contradiction to what seems obvious to ordinary everyday experience. For example, people have always thought that the earth is flat, and it took centuries before everyone agreed that it wasn't. It seemed obvious that the sun revolved around the stationary earth; And only after a fierce struggle did the point of view that is now known to every schoolboy take hold. Until the XIX century, the existence of meteorites was denied and ridiculed in every possible way. The defamation of the theory of relativity, cybernetics and genetics is still alive in the memory of the older generation of our contemporaries.

The rejection of the idea of the existence of our personality after the death of the physical body in the form of a certain part – the "soul" – separating from the body at the moment of its death is especially understandable in our Soviet society. We are, in fact, a unique phenomenon in world history, since nowhere and never has there existed a state in which millions of people for 70 years have been convinced by all conceivable means that there is no God, no other world except the visible one. Let's not evaluate the results that this atheistic civilization has brought now – they are obvious to the whole world, and we ourselves are beginning to think about why we, having 50% of the world's black soil, import wheat from America.