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."

The second case concerns a nineteen-year-old . A man who was driving his friend home in a car. He said that another car ran into them at the intersection. "I heard the side of the car cracking, and then there was one moment as if I was moving in the dark, in some kind of closed space. All this lasted only one moment, and then I suddenly, well, as if I were hovering two meters above the road, four meters from the car, and I heard a fading echo from the roar of the collision. It subsided in the distance."

Then he saw people running and crowding around the car, he saw his friend getting out of the car and shocked, he saw his own body in the wrecked car, covered in blood and with twisted legs. He watched as people tried to free his body. The phenomena described above and the very concept of clinical death can sometimes cause disbelief, After my report, I was sometimes objected: "If a person revived after clinical death, then it was not death."

How to understand such an objection? The point is not how to call such a state – "clinical death" or "near death", as Moody calls it, but in the very existence of this amazing phenomenon, when some part of a person comes out of his body and is able to observe the body and everything around it from the outside. This alone shows that conscious life can go on independently of the physical body, and even without it at all.

The denial of this phenomenon speaks of a person's unwillingness to understand and admit it into his consciousness, and he finds the verbal formula "so it was not death", which relieves him of the need to accept what violates his comfortable worldview. This mechanism of subconscious blocking is well known to psychologists.

In the medical literature, there are many reports about the continuation of life after the death of the body. Life outside the body was experienced and described by Carl Gustav Jung, one of the leading psychiatrists of our time, and a number of other scientists. Some of those brought back to life remained in a state of temporary death for more than an hour. Mormons are well acquainted with this phenomenon.

Cases of temporary death with the departure of the soul from the body and return to it were known even before the works of modern resuscitators. From time to time they were described, but these reports were usually not believed, what they testified to seemed too strange. As an example, let us cite the case of K. Uexkul.

This report was first published by Archbishop Nikon in the "Trinity Leaflets" in 1916, and later reprinted in the journal "Orthodox Life" (No 7, 1976) and in the third issue of the collection "Hope" under the title "An Incredible for Many, but a True Event."