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."

K. Uexkul, who told about his experience, soon after the incident went to a monastery.

Archbishop Nikon's report is given in an abridged form.

He writes that before K. Uexkul did not think, read the holy books, admitted that everything written in them was true, but he did not have a sense of faith, and death remained for him the end of human existence. He was a formal Christian for many years. He went to church, was baptized, but in essence he did not believe, he did not take everything seriously.

After many years of a quiet life, he fell ill with pneumonia. He was ill for a long time and seriously, but one morning he suddenly felt quite well. The cough disappeared, the temperature dropped to normal. To his surprise, the doctors became worried... Oxygen was brought. And then - chills and complete indifference to the environment. He says:

"All my attention was focused on myself... and a kind of bifurcation... there is an inner man – the main one, who has complete indifference to the external (to the body) and to what happens to it."

He continues: "It was amazing to live, to see and not understand anything, to feel such alienation from everything. For example, the doctor asks a question, and I hear, understand, but do not answer - I do not need to talk to him. And suddenly I was pulled down into the ground with terrible force... I rushed about. "Agony," the doctor said. I understood everything. He was not afraid. I remembered that I had read that death was painful, but there was no pain. But it was hard and languid for me. I was pulled down... I felt that something had to separate... I made an effort to free myself, and suddenly I felt light, I felt peace.

I remember the rest clearly. I'm standing in the room, in the middle of it. To my right, doctors and nurses are standing in a semicircle, around the bed. I wondered what they were doing there, because I was not there, I was here. I came closer and looked. When I saw his double, I was not frightened, but only surprised – how is this possible? I wanted to touch myself – my hand went through as if through emptiness.