Soldiers sit in a trench under artillery fire. "We continued to eat... I took a bite of my slice of cheese and took a sip of wine... Then I heard: choo-choo-choo, then something flashed... and the roar, all white, then redder, redder in the swift whirlwind... I tried to breathe, but there was no breath, and I felt that I had completely escaped from myself and I was flying and flying, caught up in the whirlwind. I flew out quickly, all as I was, and I knew that I was dead and that it was wrong to think that you were dying and that's it. Then I floated through the air, but instead of moving forward, I slid backwards. I inhaled and realized that I had returned to myself. The ground around was torn apart... my head was shaking, and suddenly I heard someone crying."

This soldier was seriously wounded and survived a temporary exit from his body.

And in the book, marked 1984, the story by Fyodor Abramov "Mother's Heart" was published.

A peasant woman is taking her seriously ill son to the district hospital on a sleigh. He is six years old. He always lived in poverty and misery. On the road, he gets worse. The mother is in a hurry.

"She didn't take me. It was cold, frosty. "Stepa," I said, "we are approaching the district. Can you see, I say?" and he asked me: "Mom, tell me when we are going to approach the district." A child! I have never been further than my village - I hunt to see the white world.

And so Stepanushka raised his head: "Mom," he said, "it's so light. What a beautiful area we have..." And that's it - it's over. So in his mother's arms he gave up his spirit."

There are a lot of such reports. More and more people are talking and writing about the life of the soul outside the body. Of course, not all. Those who do not want to believe in anything spiritual still do not see the light coming into the world.

Chapter 3

The beginning of the afterlife. Leaving the body. Two stages of perceptions. Autoscopic perceptions. Life goes on. Observations "from the outside". Attempts at contact with the material world. Space and time. Dark tunnel. The appearance of light. Transcendental perceptions. Light. Showing the past (The First Trial). Encounters with disembodied beings. What they saw there. Return to the body.

Over the past 15 to 20 years, our understanding of death has changed in many ways. What seemed implausible and incredible is written not only by spiritual and secular writers, but also by scientists, including doctors. Many verification studies have been published.

We have already written about Dr. Moody and his observations. His merit is that he objectively approached this problem, collected a large amount of material, systematized it and attracted the attention of serious scientific circles to it. He was not the first to deal with this issue. Before him, Dr. E. Küblet-Ross from Chicago worked on the problem of death, and even earlier – Carl Gustav Jung, Professor Voino-Yasenetsky (Archbishop Luke), Dr. George Ritchie and other scientists. Later, Dr. Mikhail Sabom did a lot.

By 1980, there were more than 25,000 known cases of recently deceased people being brought back to life. At present, there are many more of them. People's perceptions during their stay "on the other side" are recorded, systematized and many of them are checked.

Now scientists propose to distinguish two stages of perception: autoscopic – what the soul sees, hears and feels immediately after leaving the body, when it is still here, in our world; and transcendental – perceptions of a soul that has already gone to an unearthly world.

Above we have given three stories about the autoscopic perceptions of people who have gone through temporary death. One of them, the case of Uexkul, was described more than 70 years ago, that is, before the systematic scientific study of the phenomenon of the continuation of life after the death of the body began.