There are people who, having gone through their entire lives, from the cradle to the grave, have never seriously thought about death. Of course, it was clear to them, like everyone else, that death was the end of earthly life as we know it, but they saw death as "the end of everything," the end of the existence of the individual. And this is not at all true. The body dies, but some part of the person continues to exist, retaining the ability to see, hear, think and feel.

Formerly, not so long ago, it was possible to think differently about death, it was possible to doubt the existence of life beyond the grave, it was possible to "believe" or "not to believe", and if the latter, that is, "not to believe", was more pleasant or simply more convenient, then they did so – they did not think and did not believe. However, now, in our time, a person who is not afraid of new things and is familiar with the latest achievements of the science of death can no longer have any doubts, because it is not theories that have to be seen and accepted, but facts.

Over the past decades, science has made many new discoveries. It became known more precisely what death is in its very essence, how a person dies, what a dying person feels, and science has even begun to lift the veil on the most important thing – what awaits all of us after death. What the Church used to know and tell us is now in many respects, one might say, mainly confirmed by science. The latest discoveries were completely unexpected, especially for the so-called non-believers, and not everyone knows about them.

The modern science of death is a young branch of medicine, but it is progressing very rapidly. Famous scientists give their strength to it. Observations and research are carried out in scientific and medical institutes and large hospitals. A number of serious scientific works were published.

New horizons in this area were opened by observations, experiments, and then the practice of resuscitation, that is, the revival of dead people. Now it is proposed to distinguish between two states of death – clinical death, what we have always called death, and organic death, when structural changes in tissues have already begun. Reanimation is possible only when it begins before the irreversible destruction of the tissues of the body has manifested itself, that is, while the tissues, although dead, still retain their normal structure; After the tissues have begun to disintegrate, no resuscitation will help1.

In the literature there is a description of cases when the deceased and already declared dead sometimes came to life, sometimes even without any outside help. This prompted people to try to revive those who had just died. The most ancient attempts were, of course, very primitive - they applied heat to the stomach, flogged with nettles, blew air into the lungs with bellows, put on a horse in the hope that the shaky ride would bring the deceased back to life. As now, with the use of electric shocks, they felt that strong irritation was necessary. Of course, all these early attempts were rarely successful. Nevertheless, people did not stop hoping that someday it would be possible to bring life back to the dead. And scientists not only hoped, but also worked on this problem.

Not so long ago, if a vital organ stopped working, a person died. For example, cardiac arrest meant death, and nothing could be done. However, medical scientists have developed new methods of resuscitation: artificial respiration, blood transfusion, injection of adrenaline into the heart, new pharmacological drugs. Cardiopulmonary machines appeared, it became possible to stimulate a stopped heart with electric currents. And so it turned out that if the state of death did not last too long and the irreversible disintegration of the body tissues had not yet occurred, it was possible to make the stopped heart beat again, the motionless blood to circulate again and supply the brain and other organs with oxygen, glucose and other vital materials.

A recently deceased person can sometimes be revived. Such people, who went through temporary death, then told about their experiences during their stay "on the other side". They retained the ability to perceive their surroundings, could, for example, look at their dead body from the outside, see how doctors and nurses were trying to bring it back to life, and could hear and understand their conversations. Thus, it turned out that the person brought back to life retained the memory of what happened and later could tell about what he saw and heard when his body was dead.

The "personality" or "soul" does not die at the same time as the body, but continues to exist independently. If the deceased can be revived, the soul returns to the body.

One of the pioneers of this new branch of medicine is Dr. Raymond Moody. In November 1975, his book "Life After Life" was published in English with the subtitle "An Investigation of the Phenomenon of the Continuation of Life After the Death of the Body", and in 1977 his second book "Reflections on Life After Life" was published.

Dr. Moody collected a large amount of material - 150 cases; His books are written very simply and clearly. He provides a number of clinical case histories describing the disease, the nature of death, the use of resuscitation techniques and the stories of his patients.

Dr. Moody writes how he first became interested in this problem. In 1965, while still a student, he attended a lecture by a professor of psychiatry who said that he had died twice but had been brought back to life, and described what had happened to him when he was dead. The professor's fantastic story interested Dr. Moody, but he had no personal experience, and he did not take any action. A few years later, however, he came across another similar case and was struck by the fact that an uneducated old woman described the same thing that the professor of psychiatry had said. After that, Dr. Moody seriously began to study this, as he writes, phenomenon - the continuation of life after the death of the body. He cites many cases.

One of them is the story of a woman who was admitted to the hospital with heart disease. She was lying in a hospital bed. When she started having severe chest pains, she managed to press the bell button to call the sisters, and they came and started doing something about her. She was uncomfortable lying on her back, she turned around and suddenly stopped breathing and feeling the beats of her heart. She heard her sisters screaming, "Give the signal, give the signal," while she felt that she was coming out of her body and falling down to the floor, passing through the protective railing at the edge of the bed, and then began to slowly climb up. She saw the nurses running into the room and her doctor, and wondered, "Why is he here, and what is he doing here?" she saw them quite clearly. "I felt like a piece of paper that someone blew onto, lifting it up to the ceiling."

She hovered under the ceiling and looked down. "I watched as they tried to revive me. My body was laying down there, stretched out on the bed. He was clearly visible, and they were all standing around him. I heard the voice of one sister: "Oh, Lord, she died," and at this time another sister bent down and gave me artificial respiration – lips to lips. When she did this, I looked at the back of her head. I remember well the look of her hair – it was cut short. And then I saw how they rolled this car in there and gave currents to my chest. When they did, I saw my body just jump up on the bed, and I heard my bones cracking; It was terrible. When I saw them down there, beating my chest and rubbing my arms and legs, I thought, "Why are they trying so hard? Now I feel good."