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.

The lack of spirituality of our society is also manifested in increased aggressiveness and in the growth of crime, in which we have already overtaken the United States, where 400 murders per week caused newspaper panic, and our average 416 per week is accepted by us as a necessary evil. When there is no faith in God, when life is limited only to the visible, then there is nothing that would restrain a person from any action for the sake of achieving a momentary desire. Without personal immortality, personal responsibility for the life lived disappears. Familiarity with culture and science adds little here, since civilized norms of relationships cover only a narrow stratum, which is unable to transfer them to the rest of society, since it has nothing more convincing to justify them than personal commitment.

Personal immortality, declared in the form of glorious deeds that remain after our death, is a very weak consolation, since only a few can boast of such "deeds", and it is clear to them that no one will remember this in the next generation. Our Soviet civilization, and this is the only way to characterize our society, devoid of Christian or any other religious culture, is oriented only towards the strong, successful, and young. Failures, illnesses and death in our lives are just some unpleasant incidents that are not provided for by the movement towards a bright future.

Hence the attitude to death as something that is better not to talk about. This inevitable and most important moment of our life is covered by the same lies that until recently camouflaged almost all aspects of existence. However, it is not customary in our country to tell the patient about the true nature of his illness. Perhaps in the first stages of a fatal disease, this is somehow justified. Relatives and friends, together with the doctor, deceive the dying man. Instead of preparing for the future life, a person finds himself in an atmosphere of deception and, accordingly, alone.

Meanwhile, as the experience of doctors shows, the last days and hours of the life of a person who knows that he is facing a transition to another life are filled with the important spiritual work of reassessing the whole life, its comprehension, discarding everything small and unnecessary, and deep communication with loved ones. We deprive millions of our compatriots of all this, leaving them to die all alone in hospital beds, like used up and no longer needed human material. This is because the idea of survival after death does not fit into the concept of our society, and we do not know how to deal with the dying.

In this respect, the 18th chapter of Dr. Kalinovsky's book is especially important, which summarizes the experience of researchers who spent many hours at the bedside of the dying. It contains simple but very important advice on how to behave in such situations. This is especially important for us, the Soviet people, who have lost all the centuries-old traditions and, of course, have not created any new ones. This advice can be accepted by both believers and non-believers. In such cases, it is important to know about the stages that a person goes through when he learns or guesses that his disease is fatal. Accordingly, with these stages, one or another attitude from relatives is necessary. All of us must know this if we no longer wish to remain civilized savages in relation to the dying, far darker and more ignorant than any Russian peasant woman 100 years ago.

The author gives very true and good advice about behavior during funerals, about the attitude towards those who have lost their loved ones, about the most tragic cases, such as the death of children. Everything connected with the funeral, with the expression of grief, should be aimed at deep healing, awareness of grief. Not to withdraw into oneself, which happens when trying to isolate the closest ones from the dying person, with the intention of alleviating his suffering. Meeting with the death of a loved one not only for adults, but also for children makes the attitude to life deeper and more serious.

Acquaintance with this book is necessary for every person. True science has never contradicted genuine faith in God. The fact that a modern person, striving to explore everything and go beyond any previously seemingly impregnable boundaries of knowledge, has the opportunity to look behind the veil of death with the help of the achievements of resuscitation, even if only for 5-10 minutes, and make sure that a new life awaits us behind this veil, is one of the greatest discoveries of the second half of the 20th century. Perhaps in the years to come we will know even more about life after death. In any case, one thing is clear – we are given a revelation from God that corresponds to our current scientific thinking. How to treat it is a matter of inner sensitivity, maturity and free choice of each of us.