Michael Subom and his verification observations. - Several evidences of the continuation of life after the death of the body. Doubts. - Unusualness of the described. - "Before, it was, but it shouldn't be." - How often does this happen? Difficulty collecting material. - They are reluctant to share new knowledge. - Its influence on character and lifestyle.
In the previous chapter, many testimonies were given about the life of the soul independently of the body and after the death of the body. The posts made by Moody, Subom, Kubler-Ross and others are very interesting and important. The cases are carefully selected. Most of these are clinical case histories with descriptions of people brought back to life.
The stories about the experiences “on the other side” are sincere and similar, they differ from each other only in details; people with different education, different professions, nationalities, gender, age and so on talk about the same thing. This amazed all the scientists involved in this issue. The uneducated woman saw and experienced the same things as the professor of psychology. Usually, a part of a person who left the body saw their body from the side, often from above, observed doctors and sisters trying to revive it, and everything that was happening around, and a little later perceived many other things.
Despite the truthfulness and sincerity, these messages were still not completely convincing, since they were based mainly on the stories of people who went through a temporary death. There was a lack of objective scientific verification - whether this, as scientists call it, the phenomenon of continuing life after the death of the body really exists.
The next step was taken by Dr. Sabom. He organized verification observations and confirmed, and in fact proved, that the messages about life after death are not fiction and that the person after the death of the body really continues to exist, retaining the ability to see, hear, think and feel.
Michael Sabom is a professor of medicine at Emory University (USA). He is a cardiologist, a member of the American Society of Cardiology and has extensive practical experience in resuscitation. His book Memories of Death, subtitled Medical Research, was published in 1981. Subom confirmed what others wrote about, but this is not the main thing in his book. He conducted a number of studies, comparing the stories of his patients who survived a temporary death with what actually happened while they were "on the other side", and what was available for objective verification. The results of his research confirmed the above observations of other scientists. After the death of the body, life continues. Only those who are not familiar with the latest achievements of medical science that study death can doubt this.
Sabom writes how he came to study this issue, He worked in the hospital on night shifts with urgent calls for the dying. His views on death were then very simple. He writes: "If I were asked what I think about death, I would answer that when death comes, a person dies - that's all." He strictly separated science from religion and saw the meaning of religion in the moral precepts and consolations of the dying. He was an unbeliever, recognized exclusively science and in his work trusted only accurate laboratory and technical data. Of course, sometimes he was faced with something inexplicable, but in such cases he believed that over time, science will be able to explain this too.
Sub met Moody's book Life After Life in 1976 and at first did not attach much importance to the phenomena described there. The book market then, as now, was flooded with the wildest fantasy. Moody's book was easily mistaken for a fascinating fiction, but Subom gradually became interested in it and began to question his patients. Their stories confirmed what Moody had described, and Subom was amazed at the sincerity of the people who experienced temporary death and the similarity of their experiences.
His patients, who experienced a state of temporary death, as a rule, did not tell anyone about their experiences, did not know each other, and nevertheless all their messages testified to the same thing, For example, they said that after leaving the body, they could move freely anywhere, as well as see and hear what was happening in other rooms and corridors of the hospital, on the street and so on, while their body lay lifeless on the operating table. They contemplated their bodies from the outside and everything that doctors and nurses did to it, trying to bring it back to life. Subom decided to test these amazing reports by looking at them through the eyes of an objective researcher. He checked whether the stories of the patients coincided with what was actually happening at that time; whether those medical devices and resuscitation methods that described the deceased were really used, whether what they saw and described really happened in other rooms.
Subom has collected and published 116 cases. All of them were checked by him personally. He compared the stories with the case histories, questioned those people whom his patients, who had been brought back to life, saw and heard, again compared the testimonies of both. For example, he checked whether the described people were in the visitor's room and at what time. He drew up accurate minutes, taking into account the place, time, participants, spoken words, and so on. For his observations, he selected only mentally healthy and balanced people.
The check completely confirmed the existence of the studied phenomenon, It was confirmed that after the death of the body, the existence of the personality continues. Some part of the person continues to live; she sees, hears, thinks and feels as before.
At a time when the body was dead, people saw not only the switched on devices, but also the arrows of the devices in the position that they took in reality, described in detail and accurately the machines and devices that they had not seen before and whose existence they did not know. They heard doctors and nurses talking; watching from above, they saw their hairstyles and hats, as well as what was happening outside the walls of the room in which their body lay, and so on. All this amazing information has received reliable confirmation.
To illustrate, here are a few examples from Dr. Sabom's messages.
Severe heart attack with cardiac arrest in a 44-year-old man. Several electrical shocks had to be applied to revive. The deceased watched what was happening from outside his body and later described it in detail.
“I was somehow separate, aloof. I didn’t take part in what was happening, but looked aloof, I wasn’t very interested in all this ... Something was injected into me through an infusion device ... then they lifted it up and put it on the board. And then one of the doctors began to beat me on the chest. Before that, they gave me oxygen - a rubber tube in my nose, but now they took it out and put a mask on my face ... light green ... I remember how a table was rolled in, on which there were something like blades. And also a square device with two arrows. One stood motionless, the other moved ... But it moved slowly, not in jerks, as on a voltmeter or other devices. The first time she stopped between the first third and half of the scale. The second time passed more than half, and the third - almost three quarters. The stationary needle twitched every time this thing was pushed, and someone from the staff fiddled with it. Probably, it was repaired, and the first arrow froze, and the second continued to move ... There were two blades with wires; it's like two round discs with handles. The wires were taken one by one in my hand and placed on my chest. There were small buttons on the handle ... I saw how I was twitching ... ”(p. 48).
The personnel involved in the intensive care unit confirmed this story in every detail.
The second case was told by a 60-year-old worker who survived cardiac arrest: “When I was dying, I saw my own body, and I was sorry to leave it ... I saw everything that was happening ... At first I did not know who it was, and then I approached and saw myself and could not understand in any way,., how is it? I looked from above and slowly climbed higher and higher. "
Then he describes what the doctors and nurses were doing with his lifeless body: “I understood everything ... and saw my relatives in the emergency room ... quite clearly ... they were standing there - my wife, eldest son, daughter, and also a doctor ... No, I didn’t I could not be there, I was operated on at that time ... but I saw all of them and I know perfectly well that I was there ... I did not understand what was happening and why they were crying. And then I moved on, I found myself in another world ”(p. 154).
Subom later questioned his patient's wife and daughter. The wife fully corroborated her husband's story. The daughter also recalled that at that time the three of them were in the emergency room and talked with her father's doctor.
A person may be in a state of temporary death not only after cardiac arrest, but also under other circumstances, for example, during a surgical operation.
Subom cites one such case. His patient was in a state of clinical death, under deep anesthesia, with cardiac arrest and, of course, unconscious. He was covered with sheets and physically could not see anything.
He later described his experiences. He saw in detail the operation on his own heart, and his story corresponded to what happened in reality.
Here are short excerpts from his detailed story: “The anesthesiologist gave me an intravenous injection ... Obviously, I fell asleep, I do not remember at all how I was transported from this room to the operating room. Suddenly I saw that the operating room was lit, but not as bright as I expected. Consciousness returned to me ... They already did something to me ... my head and body were covered with sheets, and suddenly I saw everything around me ... I seemed to be half a meter above my head, as if by another person ... I saw two surgeons operated on me ... they sawed off the brisket ... I can draw this saw and the tool with which they spread my ribs ... "
He describes the course of the operation: “Many instruments ... they (the doctors) called them clamps ... I thought there would be a lot of blood everywhere, but to my surprise, it turned out to be very little ... and the heart is not what I thought. It's big; wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, like the continent of Africa. From above it is pink and yellow ... Even creepy. One part of it was much darker than the rest ... Dr. S. stood on the left side, he cut off pieces of my heart, turned them this way and that and examined them for a long time ... The doctors had a dispute whether to make a bypass or not. We decided not to do it ... All the doctors, except one, had green shoe covers, and this eccentric wore white shoes splattered with blood ... it looked strange and, in my opinion, antihygienic ... ”(pp. 93-96).
The course of the operation described by the patient coincided with the entries in the operating journal, made, of course, in a different style.
In the medical history, it was noted that it was difficult to restore blood circulation - confirmation that the patient actually experienced a state of temporary death.
The beginning of this story is very interesting, when the patient describes in simple words two completely different states: deep anesthesia and clinical death. In the first case - loss of consciousness, complete "nothing"; in the second - the ability to see from the outside your own body and everything around, the ability to hear, think and feel, being outside the body.
I repeat his words: “The anesthesiologist gave me an intravenous injection ...
Obviously, I fell asleep, I do not remember at all how I was transported from this room to the operating room. " This is the action of anesthesia. This is how many of us imagine death - complete nothingness, the absence of any perceptions. However, the patient continues: “Suddenly I saw ... Consciousness returned to me ... I saw how two surgeons operated on me. I heard their conversations ... I could understand ... I was out of my body. " This is not anesthesia, but the continuation of the life of the soul after the death of the body, in this case, after its temporary death.
Of course, many people imagine death in a completely different way. Those of us who have abandoned Christianity and who do not remember about God and the soul at all find it difficult to accept that after the death of the body, some part of a person continues to exist consciously.
This also applies to doctors. Doubts also arose among scientists studying the phenomenon of "life after life".
Of course, if you hear stories like the ones above for the first time, they may seem like fiction, Believing in their truth is not easy - and not only you or me, All three scientists we mentioned - Kubler-Ross, Moody and Subom did not immediately believe in it.
All three are people far from any science fiction, mentally balanced and serious scientists. Their books are written in dry, precise language, without any embellishments. Their goal was not to surprise or amuse the reader, but to objectively verify new data. They rejected everything dubious and, in essence, did not draw conclusions, limiting themselves to a statement of facts.
They did not know each other for a long time and worked independently, but the results of observations of all three coincided. They were all skeptics, believed in science, not religion, and, starting work, believed that their research was likely to prove the fallacy and unscientificness of belief in the afterlife. But all three were real scientists and, having met the unexpected, were not afraid to recognize it and confirm with their authority, although this could drop them in the eyes of their colleagues, who were mostly skeptical. All three became believers, Kübler-Ross said that for her it is not a matter of faith at all, because she is absolutely convinced that after this life on earth there will be another.
At the beginning of their research, all three scientists doubted: are they not inventing (or at least not embellishing) those who talk about their fantastic experiences? Why is there so little evidence like this? Why did we start learning about this only recently?
However, it turned out that such cases are not at all uncommon, Subom later gave a course of lectures on life after death and at the end of each lecture he invited those wishing to speak. Each time in an audience of 30-35 people there were one or two who reported that they had similar experiences. And although these experiences varied in detail, on the whole they coincided and did not depend on social status, profession, and so on. Believers and non-believers, ordinary people and scientists - the same thing.
To the question: “Why have you not told anyone about this so far?”, As a rule, the answer followed: “I was afraid that they would not believe me, ridicule or consider me abnormal.”
There were also those who simply could not comprehend what had happened to them. One of them, trying to explain what had happened, said: "Yes, it was, although it shouldn't have been."
And the second ended his story with the words: "It opened up a new world for me ... I think there is still a lot that I have to find and understand."
Many found it difficult to find words to describe their experiences. They said: "There are no such words in our language ... This is different ... This is not our world, .."
All three scientists write out of the sincerity of the storytellers and that they had no doubts that all this really happened. Many came to know better what death is, came to faith in God and changed their way of life: they became more serious and deeper. Some have changed their profession - went to work in hospitals or nursing homes to help those who need help.
One of those who visited "there" said that, in his opinion, everything was shown to him by God. He can only explain it this way. Now he knows that there is not only death, but also life after death. Having penetrated into this great mystery, he lost his fear, He thinks that God did not want him to die, but gave him a glimpse of this mystery and sent him back.
Contact with what is behind the grave changes the character of people for the better.
A big change has come with Dr. Sabom himself. He ends his scientific, largely statistical book on a religious note. He writes that, meeting face to face with death, people received a lot from the Spirit and this was preserved in their lives. The final phrase of his book is a quote from the 1st Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians: “Now I know in part, and then I will know, just as I am known. And now these three abide: faith, hope, love; but love is the greatest of them ”(1 Cor. 13: 12-13).
Transcript
1 Dr. Michael Subom. Memories of death Book from the library of the Russian Association for Instrumental Transcommunication (RAIT) Our website on the Internet: egf.rf Group in contact:
2 I am deeply indebted to many individuals for their assistance in completing this study and in preparing this book — to doctors and nurses at the University of Florida and Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center for referring patients who have experienced clinical death; Dr. Kenneth Ring, Dr. Raymond Moody, Jr. and John Audette for their endless encouragement and support; John Eagle, publicist at Mockingbird Books, for his leadership in publishing this book; from my brother, Dr. Steve Sabom, for his criticism of the manuscript; Jeanne Fleg of Harper & Row for her editorial assistance; and Lainey Shaw for typing the manuscript. I am especially indebted to Sarah Kreutziger, who introduced me to this topic and worked with me in my early years of study. Sarah helped shape this study and interviewed several patients whose reports are found here. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Diana, for her long and stimulating hours we spent discussing the near-death experience, for her important revisions of early drafts of the manuscript, and on top of that, for her continued encouragement to continue studying and publishing the book = “There are some oddities in human dying, which, in any case, are incomparable with the concept of ultimate suffering. People who almost died and then returned to describe their experiences never mentioned anguish or pain or even despair; on the contrary, they described a strange, unusual sense of calm and peace. The act of dying seems to be associated with a slightly different event, perhaps pharmacological, that makes it something completely different from what most of us are used to expecting. We can find out more about it. Something may be happening that we don't know about yet. " (Lewis Thomas, President M.D., Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute, New England Journal of Medicine, June 1977) = Foreword Over the centuries, a variety of experiences have been retold by people who nearly died. Dazzling light, beautiful landscapes, the souls of deceased loved ones - everyone understood in what the visions of death were transmitted. Relatives surround the dying face to say goodbye and hear his last words. If a person miraculously returned, he described the sensation of swimming and then returning. Now, more than ever before, people are returning from the threshold of death. With the latest advances in medical technology, hearts can be restarted, breathing restored, and blood pressure can return to normal. Patients, who in the recent past could definitely die, now return to the continuation of their earthly existence. They recalled a lot of their experiences, and we listened. “If one considers death to be a continuum or process,” says Dr. George E. Burch, a venerable cardiologist, “then of course those patients who were resuscitated within minutes of cardiac arrest have experienced and extracted medical information from the depths of this. continuum as far as possible The introduction of effective methods of cardiac resuscitation has provided the physician with a unique opportunity to explore the medical experiences associated with dying and death. " In my personal practice of cardiology, over the past five-plus years, I have conducted extensive research among the experiences faced by people close to death. Many of these people, victims of cardiac arrest and other life-threatening crises, described a series of extraordinary events that took place while the patients were unconscious and dying. Some considered this experience to be a preferential representation of another realm of existence. This book explores the nature and meaning of the near-death experience. My goal is not to repeat what was previously said on this topic or to etch anecdotes for their own sake, but to provide fresh observations of the content of the experience, of the people who encounter it, and of the clinical parameters under which it occurred. In light of these observations, I revisited various explanations appearing in scientific journals and the yellow press. Memories of dying that fill these pages, in turn, must acquire new meaning. What I learned from sick beds and in clinics during this study led me to rethink my own basic beliefs about human nature, the process of dying, and the practice of medicine. I present my findings to you in the hope of your complicity in the trepidation and captivity that I experienced, delving into these questions, questions concerning the global nature and meaning of life. (M.B.S., Decatur, Georgia, March 1981) = Origins In July 1970, I began my medical internship at the University of Florida. My first night on call found me covering the minimum medical level at the main hospital and supporting other interns assigned to the emergency room. My early evening hours were spent on chores getting stories
3 diseases and conducting medical examinations at three selected appointments, resuming the fourth and making an electrocardiogram for a patient with chest pains. At midnight I lay down to read about the latest questions in a medical journal and instantly fell asleep. At 3-15 in the morning I jumped up on the statistics page: "Code 99, emergency room, first floor Code 99, emergency room, first floor." I ran down the stairs. Thus began a ritual that I repeated countless times. As you might have guessed, "Code 99" is medical shorthand for a patient in serious condition. This is a familiar help call, calling doctors and nurses to the bedside of a patient whose condition has progressed dramatically for the worse. Essentially, it denotes the patient's near-death condition. At that point in my life (and for some years to come) I was too busy with the usual demands of my medical education to think too much about what death was like. I have been trained to keep people alive; it was not for me to contemplate the fate of those who did not. I think if someone asked me what I think about death, I would answer that with death you die and this is the end of everything. Although I grew up in a church-going family, I have always tried to separate religious from scientific doctrines. As I believed at the time, Christian beliefs in life after death served the purpose of correcting proper worldly behavior and relieving the anxiety surrounding death and dying, but such teachings remained subjective and unscientific. Unscientific that's what I've never been. Years of medical training have convinced me that if anyone follows the scientific method of using laboratory protocols and scientific research, most, if not all, of the intractable questions of the universe will eventually be answered in one form or another. Thus, there are no unexplained phenomena, but there are simply scientific facts awaiting discovery. Form the correct scientific research and the answer can be found. As every science student knows, the scientific method of research is the systematic collection of objective observations known as "data." Only data collected and presented rigorously and impartially are eligible for entry into the mainstream of scientific knowledge. In medicine, the clinical application of such evidence-based knowledge bears a wide-ranging responsibility to modern advances in medical diagnosis and treatment. Moreover, the physician who has been able to most effectively master and apply knowledge of scientific facts about the course of the disease will have the greatest chance of successfully treating the disease when it appears in the patient. In my early medical school years, I embraced this basic logical and scientific method for the diagnosis and treatment of disease. I am especially interested in those aspects of medicine that relate to the collection and use of measurable physiological data. Thus, in the last years of my studies, I was turned to the narrow specialty of cardiology, an exact technological discipline, largely based on the recording and interpretation of physiological data and their application in diseases and dysfunction of the heart. With the tools available to the modern cardiologist, heart disease is like a jigsaw puzzle, pieces of which are measured pressure in four heart chambers, mathematical formulas that use these measurements to calculate heart function, and specialized X-ray technologies that can anatomically describe heart disease. Moreover, I recognized that correct statements that take into account all natural phenomena begin with a careful collection of relevant facts from which conclusions or hypotheses can be drawn. In 1976, I completed my first year of cardiology at the University of Florida at Gainesville. I was deeply in love with the study of the nuances of clinical cardiology and preferred certain research in this field. At the same time, my wife and I joined the local Methodist church. One spring Sunday, Sarah Kreutziger, a psychiatrist-social worker from the University, presented a book that caught her eye at our Sunday School for adults. Life After Life by Raymond Moody, filled with several strange testimonies from people near death. Great interest was aroused among the participants in the school. Personally, however, I took it without much enthusiasm. My principled scientific consciousness simply could not take seriously such vague descriptions of spirits from the afterlife and the like. As the only doctor presented that morning, I was asked for my opinion at the end of the lesson. The smartest thing I could find to answer at that moment was: "I don't believe in this." A week later, Sarah called me. She was invited to present Moody's book to a church-wide audience and asked me to participate in the program as a medical advisor. I reminded her how skeptical I was of Moody's findings, but she insisted that my participation in the program was mostly about answering impromptu medical questions related to this kind of topic. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed. In preparation for our interview, Sarah borrowed me her copy of Life After Life, a just-published book not yet available in Gainesville's bookstores. I studied it cover to cover, but remained unconvinced that it was publicist material. A little later, Sarah and I met to plan a presentation. To make the conversation more meaningful, we decided to conduct a short examination of some of our hospitalized patients who survived clinical death, similar to those from Moody's book. We had the opportunity to ask them if they had some experience while they were dying and unconscious. If no one had such an experience (of which I was completely sure), at least we could inform the audience that,
4 indeed, "We asked." If suddenly the experience is described, it can be used as the basis of our presentation. Finding clinical death survivors was a simple matter for both Sarah and me. She was in daily contact with patients from the kidney dialysis department. Many of them met with clinical death more than once during a long time of their renal disease, which now requires dialysis in a hospital. I, on the other hand, have taken care of a variety of patients reanimated from cardiac arrest. We started our survey. The third patient I started was a middle-aged housewife from Tempa, who, according to medical records, suffered several clinical deaths of various kinds. She was in the hospital for tests. I met her at her apartment one evening at eight o'clock, and we discussed at length the medical details of her previous illnesses. At the end, I asked her if she had any experience during the times when she was unconscious and was terminally ill. Once she was convinced that I was not a clandestine psychiatrist pretending to be a cardiologist, she began describing the near-death experience I had heard for the first time in my career. To my great amazement, the details were consistent with those described in Life After Life. I was even more impressed by her sincerity and the deeply personal meaning of her experience to herself. At the end of the interview, I had a distinct feeling that what this woman shared with me that night was a deeply personal perspective on a side of medicine that I knew nothing about. Early the next day, I informed Sarah of my find. She had similar news - from a patient with chronic liver and kidney failure. We decided to make an audio recording of these messages for our upcoming presentation. Both patients agreed to write down their stories until their similarities were revealed. Our presentation on Life After Life, featuring the taped cases of our two patients, was enthusiastically received by a crowded church-wide audience. For me, it just meant that my gratitude to Sarah was more than justified. Over the next few weeks, I often thought about the woman I was interviewing and the effect that experience had on her later life. Medically speaking, she was very fortunate enough to survive her close encounters with death. But more important to her than the fact of survival was the experience she gained in a coma. I thought about the meaning of all this for me. I went back to Moody's book. Several things continued to bother me about his material and method of presentation. On the one hand, the incidents in Life After Life were collected in a very casual, unsystematic manner. A lot of reports were from people who shared their life experiences with Moody after one of his presentations on the topic. There was no way to prove whether these similar testimonies were genuine or were simply fabricated replays. Moreover, Moody claimed that 150 people were interviewed for his book, but only a small fraction of that number was included as examples. Did the experiences of all 150 people fit well with the models they described, or were these basic models based on a select minority from a whole group that did not represent the experience as a whole? Who were the people describing their experiences, and what were their social, educational, professional, and religious backgrounds? Plus, as a doctor, I wanted to know the medical details of the crises that (supposedly) led to the near-death experience. I was worried about these omissions in his book. Moody himself acknowledged many of the pitfalls of his book at the end of Life After Life: “As I wrote the book, I was acutely aware that my goals and perspectives could easily be misunderstood. In particular, I would like to tell scientifically minded readers that I am fully aware that what I have done here is not scientific research. " For the sake of getting answers to my questions, "scientific research" should have taken place. I decided to try. I contacted Sarah and she responded. From our initial interviewing experience, we realized that with our direct access to a wide variety of patients with life-threatening illnesses, we were both in ideal conditions to conduct such an investigation. We were actively involved in any therapy or counseling for these patients, and we did not need special permission to contact them directly for interviews. Moreover, both patients and staff perceived us as critical members of the medical team, rather than as outside researchers who suddenly appear on the scene for a somewhat unusual purpose. I discussed with Sarah my main objections to Moody's work, and based on that, we designed our research form based on the six questions we wanted answers to. First, we wanted to confirm that these near-death experiences actually took place in patients at a time when they were seriously ill and were close to death. We were encouraged by our almost finished two cases, but we needed a lot more before we could be sure that a consistent experience actually took place. Our initial idea was to interview 20 or 30 patients and then publish our findings as a preliminary report in a medical journal. Secondly, we wanted to carefully study the content of personally collected cases and compare our findings with Moody's anecdotal descriptions of the near-death experience in Life After Life. Do these experiences follow a consistent pattern - or do they differ significantly from person to person?
5 Third, how general is the near-death experience? To answer this question, a group of near-death survivors had to be interviewed without Sarin and my knowledge, whether the near-death experience took place in advance or not. The frequency of NDEs could then be determined by comparing the number of people reporting NDEs with the total number of NDEs interviewed. This approach is called prospective study. Fourth, what were the educational, professional, social, and religious backgrounds of people describing similar experiences in the mortal line. Will this information provide a clue as to why some people have near-death experiences and some do not? In addition, medical issues (such as type of near-death critical incident, duration of loss of consciousness, or method of resuscitation) affect entering the near-death experience? Fifth, did the content of the near-death experience in some sense depend on the basic characteristics of the person or the medical details of the near-death state? For example, was it only devout religious people who described being in the light and the beautiful afterlife environment? Could plausible out-of-body descriptions of resuscitation techniques be described only by well-educated, informed individuals who had some knowledge of similar procedures from books, through or similar courses in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)? Are only persons who have been unconscious for a long time faced with the afterlife? Finally, was the reduction in fear of death expressed by people interviewed by Moody a result of the near-death experience in itself, or simply the result of surviving a close encounter with death? The next thought has plagued me ever since I read Moody's book. He noticed that many people were able to subsequently retell specific events that took place in close proximity to their physical bodies while they believed they were unconscious. More importantly, this retelling consisted of visual details. However, Moody did not attempt to substantiate these reports with medical records or other available means. Nowadays, most of the patients I was going to interview have been resuscitated after cardiac arrest. During this period of my career, I personally directed and participated in more than a thousand such resuscitations. I knew what resuscitation was, what it was like. I was looking forward to the moment when the patient will declare that he SEE what was happening in his room during his own intensive care. At such a meeting, it would be my assignment to meticulously examine details that would normally not have been known to those uninterested in medical personnel. Essentially, I contrasted my experience as a trained cardiologist with the visual recollections of lay people told to me. In doing so, I was convinced that obvious inconsistencies would emerge that would diminish the importance of these alleged visual observations to nothing more than guesswork on the part of the patient. After deciding on the objectives of our study, Sarah and I discussed the patient selection criteria. Due to the highly subjective nature of the material, we decided to exclude several patients with known mental illness or any significant mental disorder. At the very least, we needed to play it safe that our subjects were mentally adequate before their testimony was admitted into our research. Apart from this one exception, any dying patient (see below) had the right to be interviewed. I had to be responsible for contacting the survivors of the near-death crisis in the intensive care units of these two hospitals at the University of Florida Shands & Veterans Administration. Sarah would review the cases admitted to the Shands kidney dialysis units and the cases she encountered in her general counseling rounds for critically ill patients. As for the critical condition as such, it could contain any illness or episode in which the patient lost consciousness and was physically dying. But what was our definition of lack of consciousness, and how could it be defined? I have pondered this question due to the lack of a universally accepted medical or scientific definition of loss of consciousness that has been consistently tested using objective scientific techniques. Anesthesiologists, with all the clinical skills and technologies (including electroencephalogram) at their disposal, are often unable to accurately determine the level of awareness (or consciousness) in carefully examined patients under general anesthesia. The limited evidence in the medical literature has been described by patients presumably under deep surgical anesthesia who may later recall intense pain and fear while partially awake on the operating table. Moreover, psychologists and physiologists in preclinical situations had the same difficulty in clearly determining the status of an unconscious person. For the success of our research, we decided, be that as it may, to use the term "lack of consciousness" to express any specific period of time during which a person completely loses subjective awareness of the environment and himself. In simple terms, this is what is most commonly referred to as loss of consciousness. In addition to the loss of consciousness, each patient had to be physically near death. You may wonder if this is the same as clinical death. Unfortunately, the term "clinical death" has been used in recent years so indiscriminately that it has lost its clear meaning. Years later, Professor Negovsky, a Russian scientist, defined the term in a series of physiological experiments carried out at the Laboratory of Experimental Physiology of Resuscitation at the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR. Using an experimental model of fatal severe blood loss in dogs, he defined "near death" as:
6 “Clinical death is a condition when all external signs of life (consciousness, reflexes, respiration and cardiac activity) are absent, but the body as a whole is not yet dead; the metabolic processes of its tissues continue to continue, and in a certain state it is possible to restart all its functions; that is, the condition is reversible with appropriate therapeutic intervention. If the body in a state of clinical death admits the natural course of events, then the state of clinical death is followed by an irreversible state of biological death. The transition from the state of clinical death to biological death is both a destructive and continuous process, because in its initial stages it is almost impossible to completely restore the activity of the body in all its functions, including the central nervous system, but it is still possible to restore an organism with altered functions of the cortex. brain, that is, an organism that will not function in natural conditions of existence. Subsequently, it becomes possible to restore the activity of only some organs under artificial conditions, and then this becomes impossible. During biological death, a degradation of metabolic activity specific to a dead organism occurs. Important experimental material collected by several authors has shown that 5-6 minutes is the maximum duration of the state of clinical death, during which the cerebral cortex of an adult organism can survive with the subsequent restoration of all its functions. This Russian scientist's definition of clinical death is an accurate description of a specific physiological state. Today the term is used to describe a wide range of medical and non-medical conditions: cardiac arrest in the absence of palpitations and breathing, patients in coma with persistent heartbeat and breathing, found in a street corner “unresponsive” due to simple uncomplicated fainting or alcoholic torpor, etc. etc. To complicate matters, brain death is now a popular term used to refer to irreversible widespread cerebral inactivity (i.e., flat EEG) in a patient considered medically irreversible even with ongoing cardiac activity. Using Negovsky's definition of near-death death, a brain death victim is not clinically dead due to continued normal cardiac activity, but, on the other hand, is often considered “dead enough” not to warrant typical medical life support measures. Because of this apparent confusion in terminology, we decided to select patients whom we identified as physically near-death, that is, in some bodily condition as a result of an extreme physiological catastrophe, accidental or not, which is reasonably considered to lead to irreversible biological death in most cases, and , if available, is a medical emergency. In general, these conditions can include cardiac arrest, severe traumatic injury, profound coma from metabolic disorder or systemic illness, and the like. As it turned out, several people at this stage were so close to death that they were actually given up on them. A striking example of this was the case of an American soldier (Interview 69, Table I) who received numerous injuries on the battlefield one early morning in Vietnam. His body was so painfully shredded that everyone who had to do anything to him considered him dead: (1) North Vietnamese soldiers, who had removed his shoes and a belt pistol; (2) American soldiers who put his body in a bag and put him on a truck along with other corpses; and (3) an undertaker who made an incision in the left groin to find a vein into which embalming fluid could be injected. Blood flowing from the incision made by the undertaker was the first sign that the man had not yet died. Our interviewing techniques have been standardized to minimize any bias that we might convey in our verbal descriptions of our interviewed patients. When we first approached a patient, we could shy away from mentioning our interest in the near-death experience and could act as if we were looking for ordinary medical details. The patient could be asked to reconstruct events that could have been remembered immediately before the loss of consciousness, and then recall those that were immediately upon awakening. Further inquiry could be made about the memories of the period of being unconscious. As it turned out, the patients were completely unaware of the real intention of the interview until we asked about some experience during their unconsciousness. At this stage, some patients claimed that there were no memories, and simply reiterated the fact that they were completely unconscious, knocked out and unaware of anything that was happening at the time. Other patients, however, may have hesitated, looked at us with restraint and answered, “Why are you asking? ". Our usual response was: “I am interested in the experiences and reactions of patients who survived a critical medical illness. Some patients have shown that they have experienced certain events while completely unconscious. I am sincerely interested in any such experiences, no matter how they are manifested. " After that, such a patient usually began to disclose his near-death experience, preceding his remarks like this: "You will not believe it"; “I never told anyone about this, but”; “It sounds stupid, but” and so on. As soon as it became clear that the patient had an unconscious experience, we asked permission to tape the rest of the interview. Rarely were the circumstances of the interview (eg, the noisy hospital environment in an open intensive care unit) that could impede judicious use of the tape recorder and extensive notes could be made to document the experience, as much as possible, from the patient's own words.
7 The blurring out of the near-death experience could then continue further without our intervention. When the patient described his experience as a whole, we asked him about the details that needed clarification. Our goal was to collect enough information about each experience so that later it could be judged on the base ten individual items derived from the descriptions of Moody's experience in Life After Life. The ten points were: 1. The subjective feeling of being dead. Did the patient describe the experience as if he were dead, or were other interpretations provided? With what was the near-death experience with personal dreams or with narcotic hallucinations, which the patient might encounter while receiving medical drugs for previous illnesses, compared? 2. Prevailing emotional content. Did the patient feel calm and / or peaceful, frightened and / or upset, or not emotionally during the NDE? In particular, if a physical body was visible in the throes of resuscitation, was the experience frightening and painful? 3. Feeling of separation from the body. Did the patient describe the feeling of being separate from the physical body during the NDE? If so, how was this separate self described? 4. Observations over physical objects and phenomena. Did the patient state that he saw and / or heard what was happening in the ward during the period of physical unconsciousness? If so, where did these observations come from from the physical body or from a point separate from the body? What were the specific details of these observations? 5. The area of darkness or emptiness. Did the patient feel passing through a region of darkness or vacuum at any point in the NDE? 6. Review of life. Did the patient experience a rapid replay of previous life events? If so, how did this reproduction take place and what was the nature of the events being recalled? 7. Light. Did the patient experience the appearance of a blinding light source, and if so, was there some meaning or identification associated with this light? 8. Entering the transcendental world. Did the patient experience a different area or dimension besides the environment of his physical body and the area of darkness or vacuum? What was the nature of this environment? Did it contain boundaries or limits that seemed to them, as in Moody's cases, as a “point of no return” to the physical body? 9. Collision with others. Did the patient feel or saw the appearance of other "spirits" during the NDE? If so, how were these "spirit entities" identified? Did they perceive themselves as dead or alive at this time, and was there any communication between the patient and these other characters? If so, what was the nature and content of any such communication? 10. Return. Did the patient experience his return from death as a voluntary or spontaneous incident? Was there a specific reason for coming back? The structured part of the interview could end with a short set of specific biographical points: age, gender, nationality, years of formal education, profession, place of residence, religious affiliation and frequency of church attendance. We could also find out if the patient knew anything about the near-death experience from other resources prior to his personal encounter with it. Finally, each patient could be asked to rate the effect, if any, that the crisis incident (with or without NDE) had on his fear of death and his belief in an afterlife. At the conclusion of the interview, we could take time for each patient to discuss any questions or feelings they might have. As it turned out, almost every patient who had a near-death experience, in one way or another, expressed great gratitude to us for the time and interest in listening to his experience. Many were unable to discuss this with their closest friends or relatives for fear of ridicule and thus found it reassuring that Sarah or I would listen to them in an uncritical manner. The interview time was significant. If a patient recently had a near-death crisis, we wanted to interview him as often after the event as possible, while the details were fresh in his mind. However, early interviews reduced the likelihood that discussions with family members, reading related materials, etc., would influence the patient's experience. However, the patient's state of health had to be relatively stable in order for us to consider it appropriate to begin our interview. The retelling of a near-death experience was a highly emotional event that could have adverse effects on the critically ill and unstable patient. The location for the interview depended on the patient's state of health. Our goal was to create as private and uninterrupted atmosphere as possible with interviews and audio recordings. If the patient was an outpatient, the interview could be conducted in the most appropriate private room of the hospital or in the office. Many
8 interviews were conducted at the hospital bed as needed. The recording was done on site and could sometimes be interrupted due to the constant flow of clinical procedures associated with a typical hospital routine (administering treatment, checking blood pressure, etc.). Sometimes the patient's weakness forced him to end the interview completely and continue the next day. In the beginning, Sarah and I acknowledged that long interviews are not practical for hospitalized patients recovering from a near-fatal accident. Accordingly, we have limited the number of basic questions to a few especially necessary ones and have focused our main efforts on the content of the near-death experience as such. Our interviews began in earnest in May. In time, other doctors and paramedical staff learned about our research and began referring their near-death patients to us. Moreover, we began to conduct conversations with local churches and citizen groups and invariably acquired several new cases from our audience. We interviewed these individuals too and did our best to obtain their medical records to document the details of their critical incidents. Since these cases came to our attention, they did not fit into the form of prospective study, as described earlier in this chapter. Most of the NDE questions we wanted to answer (eg, frequency) required a prospective approach. Therefore, when analyzing our data, these referred cases were kept strictly separate from prospective, in-hospital interviews. When prospective and referral cases are later depicted in this book to describe different aspects of the near-death experience, each will be labeled with an interview number in Appendix Table I. As the interviewing progressed, it became apparent that patients who had a near-death experience at the time of their critical incident were losing a good deal of their fear of death; this result was absent in patients who experienced such critical events without such experience. We decided to document further this apparent difference in attitudes towards death between NDE and NDE patients by writing letters to each person in a study of the two Templar and Dixtein mortal anxiety scales. These scales have been separately validated by published reports in the physiological literature. The scales were sent to each patient at least six months after the date of the interview. In July 1978, I completed my studies in Florida and moved to Atlanta, taking up my current position as Assistant Professor of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and as staff physician at Athlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center. Sarah moved to Louisiana to complete her doctoral studies in social work. My position at Emory and at the Veterans Administration Hospital increased my access to NDEs to the point that I was in daily contact with patients in general medical wards and intensive care units. Moreover, physicians and paramedical staff in other Atlanta hospitals referred their NDE patients to me. So my research continues. This book is a dataset collected over a five-year investigation from May 1976 to March = 2 = - General characteristics of a near-death experience In August 1977, a sixty-year-old white male security guard was hospitalized with progressive weakness and drowsiness. Shortly after admission, he was diagnosed with acute intermittent porphyria, a rare severe metabolic disorder associated with Guillain-Barré syndrome (a paralyzing neurological disorder of unknown etiology). His condition deteriorated rapidly and he was transferred to the intensive care unit on 29 August. Despite all the efforts of the doctors, the man fell into a coma and insensibility on the second of September. His blood pressure required intravenous medication support. His breathing was completely controlled by a ventilator on an automatic cycle. His eyes were covered with a bandage to avoid corneal ulceration from prolonged exposure to air (he could not close his eyelids). After four days, his condition did not improve. An electroencephalogram was performed to determine if it was worth continuing with life support. The report reproduced: “Severely abnormal EEG with diffuse slow wave activity” - that is, some brain wave activity was still detectable. The life support system was maintained. On September 10, the man began to show some reaction to pain stimuli, and the coma began to rise. 34 days later, he was discharged from the intensive care unit after experiencing episodes of complete kidney failure, gastrointestinal bleeding requiring multiple blood transfusions, and recurrent pneumonia. On November 1, 1977, I interviewed him in his room about his recent period of unconsciousness. He could only speak in whispers due to damage to his vocal cords from a recently removed endotracheal tube (inserted into the lungs through the mouth and allowed to breathe through an artificial ventilator). With great tension, he began his story: Everything that I am telling you has really happened. It's very mysterious. I've read some beautiful old stories about it, but I'm really honest. It was an experience that I have never had before. It was so clear ... I think once you penetrate the Big Secret just a little bit like I do, it will be enough to convince you. If anyone asks me about this, I will say, “Hey, look. Here it is". (I-23)
9 And then he revealed a wonderful experience in which a man watched the medical team work on his unconscious body. At this unexpected meeting, he felt that he was admitted to the "big secret" of life and death. When we examined the near-death experiences (NDEs) described by this man and others at the same stage, a number of common characteristics emerged. Inexpressibility Most people who have encountered NDEs have had a great deal of difficulty finding the right words to describe their experience. In reviewing the tapes of our interviews, we were amazed at how people tried to describe the "indescribable." Many tried to make comparisons between their NDEs and dreams or other personal experiences, only in the end saying that such analogies were clearly inadequate. This ineffability of NDE has been commonly expressed in the following ways: “I can never explain it” (I-44); "There is no such feeling that you would experience in your normal life and that would be somewhat similar to this." (I-3) Feeling of Timelessness All individuals described their NDE as happening in a timeless dimension. As events were perceived during the experience, all intuitive sense of the duration of the experience was lost. So: “You seem to be in a state of suspended animation” (I-53); “I cannot tell the time in a situation like this. It could have been one minute ”(I-23); “There was no measurement of time. I don't know if it was one minute or 5-10 hours ”(I-3). Sense of reality A deep sense of reality overwhelmed the experience both when it happened and later, in memories. Most of the faces have stressed at least once in all interviews that their NDE was real, “as real as you and I sitting and talking here and now,” as one person presented. The typical emphasis on the reality of the experience was these comments: “This is reality. I know from myself that I was not fantasizing. It was not a so-called dream or nothingness. Those things really happened to me. It happened. I know. I went through it ”(I-15); “I looked down from the ceiling, and there were no ifs or buts about that” (I-14); “It was real. If you want, I’m quite ready for you to give me sodium pentothal. It is hellishly real ”(I-19); “I know it was real. I know that I have been there. I know it. And I know I saw myself there. I could swear on the Bible that I was there. I saw things as I see them now ”(I-63-2) (note: when the person reported more than just the NDE, the interview number I was composed of two numbers of the interview number (i.e. , 63) and the private NDE number designation (i.e., 2) from which the extract is quoted). One man even felt that his NDE was “more real than the reality here. After that, the world seems to be a mockery of real life as an invention. Like people playing games. It’s as if we’re preparing for something, but we don’t know what for ”(I-5). Death Feeling The NDE has been interpreted by almost all individuals as a “death experience” —that is, they thought they were dead or dying. This sense of death was a strong intuitive feeling that emerged early in the experience. In many cases, physical unconsciousness was a sudden and unexpected occurrence, such as cardiac arrest. In the NDE, the feeling of death seemed to unfold without the time given to the person to consciously anticipate the imminence of death before losing consciousness. One forty-five-year-old survivor of sudden cardiac arrest in a small community hospital in southern Georgia told me that the first thing he realized after he passed out was, "Something funny is happening." I asked him what he meant by that, and he replied: “I realized that I was dead, that I died. [I think] I don’t know whether the doctor knows about it or not, but I do know it ”(I-60). He then went on to describe his NDE. Another survivor of sudden cardiac arrest in the emergency room of a New York hospital put it this way: “I remember the saying I am dying. I know I am dying. Why are people so afraid to die? Why? It's fine!" (I-13). The death experience has also been described as very real by a forty-six-year-old Georgia resident who suddenly passed out during a cardiac arrest in 1969 and encountered the NDE: “I think I've been dead for a while. I mean at least spiritual understanding. I think my spirit left my body for a while. If it is death, then it is not bad ”(I-63-1). On several occasions, the "official death declaration" has been described as being made by someone else present during the critical near-death event. One such example was told by a fifty-five-year-old woman from northern Florida who suffered severe hemorrhagic shock after a major artery in her throat was accidentally ruptured during a tonsillectomy. Massive bleeding from her mouth and throat began after she recovered from the surgical anesthesia and returned to her room. Her description of her near-death experience began with the following observation:
10 I thought to myself: “What's wrong with me? Something is not right, I know. " Then, all of a sudden, I thought, "Oh, I'm dying, that's what it is," and honestly, I was happy about that. I was really happy to be dying. Then I heard her * nurses + cry: “My God, she passed away. Oh, she said she was just going to have her tonsils removed, and she passed away ”(I-41). It seems that the woman’s knowledge of dying preceded the nurse’s announcement that she had indeed passed away. Not all individuals interpreted their NDE as a death experience. A 44-year-old ex-military pilot who suffered cardiac arrest in a military hospital in 1973 told me that during resuscitation he felt "separate, keeping aloof and watching this go on as a disinterested observer." When asked about his interpretation of this experience, he replied: Honestly, I just don't know. This is the unknown. This is something like a lot of things that you don't have to believe in, but which you don't have to deny. I don't know what it was, what caused it, or what kind of phenomenon it was. Indeed, the only explanation for me was that the brain continues to function even if it was partially dead or oxygen starved. Everyone thinks that you are unconscious, but you continue to perceive objects even when you cannot speak or move. Author: Visually perceive them? Human: Visually and distinctly. A .: And visually perceived them from a different point of view, when they were lying? H: It was like a dream. You are separated from the thing and look at it like an observer. A .: But those things that you saw "in a dream" really happened? H: Oh, yes. They were in fact. This is one of the facts of life that you cannot explain. (I-32) This man was not sure how to interpret his NDE, for him it is "one of the facts of life that you cannot explain." Prevailing emotional experiences All persons reporting to the NDE were asked to describe their emotional experiences during the experience. What feeling was the dominant feeling of silence, peace and / or calmness in clear contrast to the physical pain and enduring experience of the person being in a conscious physical state immediately before or after the NDE. This contrast between pain in the physical body and painlessness during NDE was highlighted by one forty-six-year-old man after a second cardiac arrest in January 1978: * NDE + was good. It didn't hurt. In fact, no feeling whatsoever. I could see, but I could not feel * After regaining consciousness + it hurt! .. Let's say it didn't hurt, but it burned. * Electric shock + burned all the hairs on my chest, blisters here and there. (I-63-2) After cardiac arrest in January 1979, a 55-year-old textile factory worker recalled: “[After resuscitation] I asked him [the doctor] why he brought me back, since [like during the NDE] I have never would be peaceful and [before] had those terrible pains for a very long time. " (I-66) Pain from extensive head and internal injuries sustained in a car accident appears to have been left behind during the NDE of the thirty-two-year-old former paratrooper. He described him as “lovely. No noise. Everything is quiet. Everything passes at the same time. " (I-4) A car accident left another man with multiple fractures of his skull and legs and subsequent cardiac arrest. Regarding his NDE: “It's indescribable how you feel. It's really indescribable. It was so peaceful and calm. As I say, if I had a choice, I would go back there. It is indescribable. " (I-8) Emergency open heart surgery was performed without anesthesia in a 54-year-old patient's hospital bed at Athlanta VA Medical Center. Immediately before the procedure, the man lost consciousness due to deep shock (pericardial tamponade). Before unconsciousness “it hurt so badly, as if someone was hitting you with a hammer with every heartbeat. Each blow was painful. " A little later, during NDE: It was the most beautiful moment in the whole world when I came out of this body! .. Everything I saw was extremely pleasant! I cannot imagine anything in the world or outside the world with which one could compare this. Even the most wonderful moments in life are incomparable with what I have experienced. " (I-65)
11 However, periods of momentary sadness during the NDE were felt by some when they “saw” others' efforts to resurrect their lifeless physical body. A 37-year-old Florida housewife recalled an episode of encephalitis or brain infection when she was four years old, during which she was unconscious and showed no signs of life. She remembered looking down at her mother from a point near the ceiling with these feelings: The greatest thing I remember was that I felt great sadness that I could not let her know that I was okay. ... For some reason, I knew that everything was fine with me, but I did not know how to tell her. I just watched * But + it was a very quiet, peaceful feeling. In fact, it was a good feeling. " (I-28-1) Similar feelings were expressed by a forty-six-year-old man from northern Georgia when he recounted his NDE during cardiac arrest in January 1978: “I felt bad because my wife was crying and seemed helpless, and that was it. You know. But it was nice. It doesn't hurt. " (I-63-2) Sadness was mentioned by a 73-year-old French teacher from Florida when she talked about her NDE during a serious infectious disease and major epileptic seizures at the age of fifteen: I split up and sat much higher there, watching my own convulsions, and my mother and my maid were screaming and screaming because they thought I was dead. I felt so sorry for them and my body. Only deep, deep sorrow. I could still feel sadness. But I felt like I was free there, and there was no reason to suffer. I had no pain and I was completely free. " (I-54-1) Another happy NDE of one woman was interrupted by feelings of remorse over having to leave her children during a postoperative complication that brought her to the brink of death and physically unconsciousness: “Yes, yes, I was happy before until I remembered the children. Until then, I was happy to be dying. I really, really was. It was just a jubilant, cheerful feeling. " (I-41) Feelings of loneliness and dread have sometimes been recalled from the moment the person felt a pull into an area of darkness or vacuum during the NDE. Shortly after a nephrectomy (surgical removal of a kidney) at the University of Florida in 1976, a 23-year-old college student passed out due to an unexpected postoperative complication. In the first parts of her NDE: “There was total blackness around. If you move very fast, you can feel the walls approaching you. I felt lonely and a little scared. " (I-29) A similar darkness enveloped a 56-year-old man in the last phase of his NDE and scared him: “The next thing I remember was how I ended up in total, total darkness. It was a very dark place and I didn't know where I was, what I was doing there or what was happening and I started to get scared. " (I-8) In every case that unpleasant emotions (eg, sadness, loneliness, fear) were encountered during the NDE, they were perceived as short-term impressions as opposed to the gratifying NDE, a generalized content later described as pleasurable. It can be assumed that this general assessment could be different (i.e., unpleasant) if the experience suddenly ended at the point at which the unpleasant emotion was experienced. Be that as it may, this incident was not with any of the interviewees in this study. Separation from the physical body All individuals in this study who recounted the NDE described it as taking place outside of their physical bodies. They felt the "main" part of themselves separated from the physical body, and this part was able to perceive objects and events visually. During the NDE, the “detached entity” became the only “conscious” identity of the person, with the physical body left behind as the “empty shell”. This dichotomy between a "detached entity" and an unconscious physical body, following cardiac arrest and NDE in February 1976, was described by a 54-year-old Georgia builder in the following manner: “I recognized myself as lying there like looking at a dead worm or something. ... I had no desire to go back into it. " (I-65) 93 percent of individuals perceived their “separate identity” as an invisible, intangible object. This was the description given by a forty-eight-year-old firefighter from northern Florida who fell into deep uremic (kidney failure) coma at the University of Florida during his NDE, while “detached” from his physical body, “there was no sense of being, there was more like a spirit. If you think about it, you can feel your own clothes next to your skin. But there was nothing like that. There was no sensory sensation that was in any way close to the essence. " (I-53) A similar description was given by an 84-year-old retired Illinois teacher who faced NDE during severe complications following a hysterectomy in the 1930s: "I was light, airy, and felt transparent." (I-46) She was so impressed by her own experience that she wrote the following verses to capture this feeling: Soaring under the ceiling, I looked down
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Several evidences confirming the continuation of life after the death of the physical body of a person.
The stories about the experiences “” are sincere and similar to each other, differing only in details; people with different levels of education, different professions, nationalities, gender, age, etc. talk about the same thing. This amazed all researchers who dealt with this issue. An uneducated woman sees and experiences the same thing as an academician. As a rule, the part of a person leaving the body could see their body from the side, often from above, saw doctors trying to revive it, and everything that was happening around, and a little later perceived much more.
Despite the sincerity, such messages were still not completely conclusive, since for the most part they were based on the stories of people who went through a temporary death. There was a lack of objective scientific verification - whether in reality there is a phenomenon of the continuation of life after the death of a physical body.
The next step was taken by Dr. Sab. He organized verification observations that confirmed, but in fact proved that they were not fictions and that the person after the death of the body actually continues to exist, retaining the ability to think, see, hear and feel.
Dr. Michael Sabom is a professor of medicine at Emory University in the United States. He is a specialist cardiologist, a member of the American Society of Cardiology, and has extensive hands-on experience in resuscitation.
He got acquainted with the book “Life After Life” in 1976 and at first did not attach serious importance to the cases described there. The book market in those days, as now, was filled with the most outlandish fantasy. What Moody said could easily be mistaken for a curious invention, but still Subom became interested and decided to question his patients. What they said confirmed what Moody was writing about, and Dr. Saboma was struck by the sincerity of the people who went through temporary death and the similarity of their experiences.
His patients, who were on the verge of life and death, as a rule, did not tell anyone about their experiences before him, they were not familiar with each other, and yet what they said spoke of the same thing. So, for example, patients told that, leaving the body, they easily moved freely wherever they wanted, and saw and heard what was happening in other wards and corridors of the hospital, on the street, etc. They did it then when their physical body lay lifeless on the operating table. They saw from the side their body and all the resuscitation measures carried out with it in the operating room.
Dr. Sabom wanted to verify these incredible reports by looking at them from the outside through the eyes of an objective researcher. He began to check whether what the patients had said coincided with what was happening at that time in reality. Did they actually use those medical devices and resuscitation methods that were described by the people who were meanwhile dead, was in reality what the latter saw and described in other rooms, distant from the one in which the deceased lay.
Mikhail Sabom collected and published 116 cases, verified by him personally. He compared what the patients told with the case histories, questioned the people whom his patients who had returned after death saw and heard, again checking the testimony of both. So, for example, he checked whether the people described were in fact in the waiting room and at what time. He kept accurate minutes, taking into account the place, time, participants, spoken words, etc. For his research, he selected only mentally healthy and balanced people.
This test fully confirmed the existence of the studied phenomenon. It was confirmed that after the death of the physical body, the existence of the personality continues. Some part of a person remains to live, she is able to see, hear, think and feel, as before.
Then, when the body was dead, people saw not only the switched on devices, but also the arrows of their pressure gauges in the positions in which they actually were, they gave detailed and accurate descriptions of machines and devices that they had not seen before and the existence of which they did not know ... They recounted the conversations of the medics; watching from above, they described their hairstyles and hats, saw what was happening outside the walls of the room in which their body was, and so on. All of these amazing reports have been reliably confirmed. For clarity, here are some examples from Dr. Sabom's messages.
Severe heart attack with cardiac arrest in a 44-year-old man. Several electrical shocks were applied to revive. The deceased watched what was happening from a position outside his physical body and subsequently gave a detailed description.
“I was somehow separate, I was on the sidelines. I didn’t participate, but I watched indifferently, it wasn’t very interesting to me ... At first, they injected something through the rubber band that was there for infusion ... then they lifted me up and laid me on the board. And then one doctor began to beat on my chest. They used to give me oxygen - a rubber tube for my nose, and then they pulled it out and put a mask on my face. She covers her mouth and nose. It is for pressure ... light green ...
I saw how they rolled the table, on which lay something like blades. And on it was a pressure gauge, square, with two arrows. One was standing and the other was moving ... she was moving slowly, not jumping right away, like on a voltmeter or other device. The first time she went to ... between the third and half of the scale. And they repeated it, and she walked more than half, and the third time almost three-quarters. The stationary arrow jerked whenever they pushed this thing and someone fiddled with it. And I think they fixed it and it stopped and the other moved ... And there were two blades with wires from them; it is like two round discs with handles. They held a disk in their hands and placed it on my chest. There were small buttons on the handle ... I saw how I was twitching ... ”.
The personnel who took part in the intensive care unit confirmed what was said in every detail.
The second case: a 60-year-old worker who experienced cardiac arrest said: “… while dying, I saw my body there and I was sorry to leave it… I saw everything that they did… at first I did not know who it was, and then I looked at close range and saw myself and could not understand it ... how is it? I watched from above, quietly rising higher and higher. "
Then he described what the doctors were doing with his lifeless body: “I was aware of everything ... and I saw my relatives in the emergency room of the hospital ... it is absolutely clear ... they were there - my wife, my eldest son, my daughter, and the doctor ... no, it was impossible for me to be somewhere there, while I was undergoing an operation at that time ... but I saw them and I know very well that I was there ... I did not know what happened and why they were crying. And then I went further, I found myself in another world ”.
Dr. Sabom later questioned the patient's wife and daughter. The wife fully confirmed what her husband had said. The daughter also remembered that the three of them were then in the waiting room and talked to her father's doctor.
The patient was under deep anesthesia with a stopped heart. He was covered with surgical sheets and physically could not see or hear anything. He later spoke of his experiences. He watched in detail the operation on his own heart, and his story corresponded to what was actually happening.
Here are some excerpts from his long story: “The anesthetist anesthetized this part and put this thing in there (intravenously). I probably fell asleep, I do not remember anything how they transported me from this room to the one where they are doing the operations. And then, all of a sudden, I saw that the room was lit, but not as bright as I might have expected. My consciousness returned ... but they had already done something to me ... my head and whole body were covered with sheets ... and then I suddenly began to see what was happening ... I was kind of a couple of feet above my head, like I was another person in the operating room ... I saw two doctors how they sewed me up ... they sawed off the sternum ... I could draw you a saw and a thing with which they spread the ribs ... it was wrapped all around and was made of good steel, no rust ... ”.
He described the course of the operation: “... a lot of instruments ... they (the doctors) spoke clamps on them ... I was surprised, I thought that there must be a lot of blood everywhere, but there was very little ... and the heart does not look the way I thought. It's big; large at the top and narrow at the bottom, like the African continent. At the top, it is pink and yellow. Even creepy. And one part was darker than the rest, instead of everything being the same color ... Dr. S. stood on the left, he cut off pieces from my heart and turned them this way and that and looked at it for a long time ... and they argued a lot whether it was necessary to make a contour or no. And they decided not to do this ... All the doctors, except one, had boots in green covers, and this eccentric wore white boots covered in blood ... it was strange and, in my opinion, antihygienic ... ”.
The description of the course of the operation by the patient coincided with the entry in the operating journal, made, of course, in a different style.
The medical history noted that it was difficult to restore blood circulation - a confirmation of the fact that the patient actually experienced a state of clinical death.
The very beginning of the story is very curious, when the patient, without thinking or trying to understand, describes in simple words two completely different states: deep anesthesia and clinical death. In the first case, loss of consciousness, complete "nothing"; in the second, the ability to observe your own body and everything around you from the outside, the ability to think, see, hear and feel, being outside your body.
I repeat his words: “The anesthetist anesthetized this part and put this thing in there. I probably fell asleep, I do not remember anything how they transported me from this room to the one where they are doing the operations. " This is the action of anesthesia. Many of us, in exactly the same way, but mistakenly, imagine death as well - absolute nothing, the absence of any perceptions. However, the patient continues: "And then suddenly I saw ... my consciousness returned ... I saw two doctors stitching me up, I heard their conversations, I could understand ... I was out of my body." This is no longer anesthesia, but the continuation of the life of the soul after the death of the body, in this case, after the temporary death of the physical body.
Of course, many people imagine death differently. For those who have departed from Christianity and from God, and do not remember the soul at all, it is difficult to accept the fact that after the death of the body, some part of a person continues to exist consciously.
This also applies to many doctors. Doubts also appeared among scientists studying the phenomenon of “life after death”.
Of course, the above, when you hear about this for the first time, may seem like a simple invention. To believe in it like this, right away, is difficult, and not only for you or me. The scientists, Moody and Sabom, did not immediately believe in this either.
They are people far from any fantasy, calm and serious scientists. Their books are written in dry, precise language, without any embellishment. Their goal was not to surprise or entertain the reader, but to objectively verify new data. They rejected everything dubious and essentially did not draw conclusions, limiting themselves to the stated facts.
Thanks to advances in medicine, resuscitation of the dead has become almost a standard procedure in many modern hospitals. Previously, it was almost never used.
In this article, we will not cite real cases from the practice of resuscitation doctors and the stories of those who themselves suffered clinical death, since a lot of such descriptions can be found in books such as:
- "Closer to the light" (
- Life after life (
- "Memories of Death" (
- "Life at death" (
- "Beyond the threshold of death" (
The purpose of this material is to classify what people who have been in the afterlife have seen and to present what they have said in an understandable form as evidence of the existence of life after death.
What happens after a person dies
“He is dying” is often the first thing a person hears at the time of clinical death. What happens after a person dies? At first, the patient feels that he is leaving the body and a second later he looks down at himself from above, floating under the ceiling.
At this moment, a person sees himself for the first time from the outside and experiences a huge shock. In a panic, he tries to attract attention to himself, scream, touch the doctor, move objects, but as a rule, all his attempts are in vain. Nobody sees or hears him.
After some time, the person realizes that all his senses remain functional, despite the fact that his physical body is dead. Moreover, the patient experiences an indescribable ease that he has never experienced before. This sensation is so wonderful that the dying person no longer wants to return to the body.
Some, after the above, return to the body, and this is where their excursion into the afterlife ends, someone, on the contrary, manages to get into a tunnel, at the end of which a light is visible. After passing through a kind of gate, they see a world of great beauty.
Someone is met by relatives and friends, some are met with a light being, from whom great love and understanding breathes. Someone is sure that this is Jesus Christ, someone claims that this is a guardian angel. But everyone agrees that he is full of kindness and compassion.
Of course, not everyone manages to admire the beauty and enjoy the bliss. afterlife... Some people say that they fell into gloomy places and, when they returned, describe the disgusting and cruel creatures they saw.
Ordeals
Those who returned from the "other world" often say that at some point they saw their whole life at a glance. Each of their actions, it would seem, was a randomly thrown phrase and even thoughts swept before them as if in reality. At this moment, the person revised his whole life.
At this moment, there were no such concepts as social status, hypocrisy, pride. All the masks of the mortal world were thrown off and the man appeared to the court as if naked. He could not hide nothing. Each of his bad deeds was displayed in great detail and it was shown how it affected others and those who were hurt and suffering by such behavior.
At this time, all the advantages achieved in life - social and economic status, diplomas, titles, etc. - lose their meaning. The only thing that is subject to assessment is the moral side of actions. At this moment, a person realizes that nothing is erased and does not pass without a trace, but everything, even every thought, has consequences.
For evil and cruel people, this will truly be the beginning of unbearable inner torment, the so-called, from which it is impossible to get away. Consciousness of the evil done, of a crippled soul and someone else's, becomes for such people like an "inextinguishable fire" from which there is no way out. It is this kind of judgment over actions that is referred to in the Christian religion as ordeals.
Afterworld
Having crossed the line, a person, despite the fact that all the senses remain the same, begins to feel everything around him in a completely new way. His feelings seem to start working one hundred percent. The range of feelings and experiences is so great that those who returned simply cannot explain in words everything that they had to feel there.
From the more earthly and familiar to us in perception, this is time and distance, which, according to those who have been in the afterlife, flows there absolutely differently.
People who have experienced clinical death often find it difficult to answer how long their posthumous condition lasted. A few minutes, or several thousand years, it made no difference to them.
As for the distance, it was completely absent. A person could be transported to any point, at any distance, just by thinking about it, that is, by the power of thought!
A surprising point is that not all of the reanimated describe places similar to heaven and hell. The descriptions of the places of certain individuals are simply breathtaking. They are sure that they were on other planets or in other dimensions, and this seems to be true.
Judge the word forms themselves like hilly meadows; bright greens of a color that cannot be found on earth; fields flooded with wonderful golden light; cities indescribable with words; animals which you will not find anywhere else - all this does not apply to the descriptions of hell and paradise. People who visited there could not find the right words to intelligibly convey their impressions.
What does the soul look like
How do the deceased appear before others, and what do they look like in their own eyes? This question interests many, and fortunately those who have visited the border gave us an answer.
Those who were conscious of their out-of-body state say that at first it was difficult for them to recognize themselves. First of all, the imprint of age disappears: children see themselves as adults, and old people see themselves as young.
The body is also changing. If a person had any injuries or injuries during his lifetime, then after death they disappear. Amputed limbs appear, hearing and vision return, if it was previously absent from the physical body.
Meetings after death
Those who have been on the other side of the “veil” often say that they met there with their deceased relatives, friends and acquaintances. Most often, people see those with whom they were close during life or were related.
Such visions cannot be considered the rule; rather, they are exceptions that do not occur very often. Usually such meetings serve as edification for those who are still too early to die and who must return to earth and change their lives.
Sometimes people see what they expected to see. Christians see angels, the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, saints. Non-religious people see some kind of temples, figures in white or young men, and sometimes they see nothing, but feel "presence."
Communication of souls
Many reanimated people claim that something or someone communicated with them there. When they are asked to tell what the conversation was about, they find it difficult to answer. This happens because of the language they do not know, or rather slurred speech.
For a long time, doctors could not explain why people did not remember or could not convey what they heard and considered it just hallucinations, but over time, some who returned were still able to explain the mechanism of communication.
It turned out that people there communicate mentally! Therefore, if in that world all thoughts are “heard”, then we need to learn to control our thoughts here, so that there we are not ashamed of what we involuntarily thought.
Jump the frontier
Almost everyone who has experienced afterlife and remembers her, talks about a kind of barrier that separates the world of the living and the dead. Having crossed over to the other side, a person will never be able to return to life, and every soul knows it, even though it has never been reported to her.
This border is different for everyone. Some see a fence or lattice at the border of a field, others see the shore of a lake or sea, and still others as a gate, stream or cloud. The difference in descriptions follows, again, from the subjective perception of each.
After reading all of the above, only an inveterate skeptic and materialist can say that afterlife it's fiction. For a long time, many doctors and scientists denied not only the existence of hell and heaven, but completely ruled out the possibility of the existence of an afterlife.
The testimony of eyewitnesses who experienced this state for themselves drove into a dead end all scientific theories that denied life after death. Of course, today there are a number of scientists who still consider all the testimony of the reanimated to be hallucinations, but such a person will not be helped by any evidence until he himself begins a journey into eternity.
Not finding this book by Dr. Sabom in Russian on the Internet, we decided to order the English version in paper form beyond the seas and oceans and translate it. Our interest is purely scientific, because it is this book that claims to contain scientific facts about the fate after death. It is important for us to know these facts in order to realize our personal relationship to the Universe or the Supreme, if He does exist. Is it scientific to be an atheist? From now on we are starting the gradual publication of our translation.
Memories of Death: A Medical Investigation
Striking new clinical evidence with important implications for our understanding of near-death experiences presented by renowned cardiologist and professor of medicine
Mikhail Sabom, 1981
Gratitude
I would like to express my deepest gratitude for their help in conducting the research and preparing this book: Doctors and nurses at the University of Florida and Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center for referring patients who have experienced clinical death; Dr. Kenneth Ring, Dr. Raymond Moody, J. and to John Audette (Jr., and John Audette) for their endless encouragement and support; To John Egle, a publicist at Mockingbird Books, for contributing to the publication of this book; to my brother, Dr. Steve Sabom, for criticizing the manuscript; Jeanna Flagg of Harper & Row for editorial assistance; and Lani Shaw for typing the manuscript.
Special thanks go to Sarah Kreutziger, who introduced me to the topic and worked with me during the early years of studying the problem. Sarah helped define the form of the study and interviewed several of the patients described in the book.
I also want to thank my wife Diana for the long and fruitful hours of discussing the near-death experience, for seriously revising the early drafts of the manuscript, and, in addition, for supporting and encouraging me all this time to study the problem and my desire to publish the book.
“There are still some oddities in the way people die, at least it doesn't fit with the idea of suffering a person experiences at the time of death. Those who almost died and then returned to describe their experiences never mentioned anguish or pain or even despair; on the contrary, they described a strange, unusual sense of calm and peace. The act of dying seems to be related to some other, perhaps pharmacological, thing that makes it something completely different from what most of us are used to expecting. We could find out more about this ... Something might be happening, something we don't know about yet. "
Lewis Thomas, MD, President of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute, New England Journal of Medicine, June 1977
Foreword
Over the centuries, people who have experienced clinical death have returned to talk about their amazing experience, about the many sensations they experienced: bright light, charming landscapes, the souls of deceased loved ones and loved ones - all these words were present in descriptions of death.Relatives surrounded the dying man to say goodbye and hear his last words. If a person suddenly returned from the other world, he could remember the feeling of flight, and then - about the "return."
Nowadays, people return from the threshold of death much more often than before. Now, thanks to the latest advances in medicine, hearts can be restarted, breathing restored, and blood pressure can also be brought back to normal. Those patients who would probably have died in the not too distant past are now being returned from the other world, allowing them to continue their earthly existence. At the same time, they remember many experiences, then telling them to us. “If we imagine death as a process, as some kind of event extended in time,” says Dr. George E. Burch, a renowned cardiologist, “then, of course, patients who were resuscitated a few minutes after cardiac arrest had a spiritual experience. Feeling this process as strongly as possible ... Implementation of truly effective methods of cardiac resuscitation<…>provided the physician with a unique opportunity to explore the spiritual experience associated with death and dying. "
Over the past five years of my cardiology practice, I have done extensive research related to the experiences of people who have been on the brink of death. Many of them, having experienced cardiac arrest or other life-threatening crises, later recalled a number of extraordinary events that took place while they were unconscious or in a state of clinical death. Some of them viewed this experience as opening the veil of the secret of the other world, another reality of existence.
This book explores the nature and meaning of the near-death experience. I did not set myself the goal of repeating what has already been said about this, or coming up with several new anecdotes; my mission was to provide a fresh perspective on the content of this experience, on the people who experienced it, and on the conditions in which it happened. As part of this research, I examined a variety of NDE explanations that I found in scientific and popular journals. The memories of death in these pages should, in turn, take on new meaning.
What I heard during this research, being in the clinic or at the bedside, made me rethink some of my basic ideas about the essence (nature) of man, about death as a process, and about medical practice. I present my findings to you in the hope that you will share with me the thrill and charm that I experienced as I delved into these questions - questions that touch upon the whole essence and meaning of life.
(M. B. S., Decatur, Georgia, March 1981)
Origins
In July 1970, I began my internship at the University of Florida. On the first night, I was on duty in the general therapy department and in addition replaced another intern who was recalled to the emergency room. At the beginning of my shift, in the early evening, I went about my usual shift tasks: I selected three medical records and examined the patients, then updated the IVs and performed an ECG on a patient with chest pains. At about midnight, I lay down to read the latest issue of a medical journal, but instantly fell asleep. At 3:15 in the morning I was awakened by an intercom message: "Code 99, emergency department, second floor ... Code 99, emergency department, second floor."
Thus began the ritual, which I have repeated countless times afterwards. As you may have guessed, Code 99 means a critically ill patient. A call for help familiar to all doctors and nurses, he calls doctors to the bedside of a patient whose condition has deteriorated sharply and his life is in danger. In short, it means that the patient is dying.
And then, and the first years of work, I was so busy with the usual internship activities that I did not even think about what death was like and what it was like. I was taught to keep people alive; contemplating those who did not do this was not for me. I suppose if someone asked me then what I think about death, I would answer that at the moment of death we die and everything ends. Although I grew up in a religious family, I have always shared a religious and scientific understanding of life and death. At that time, I believed that Christian belief in life after death was nothing more than a way of guiding people's behavior in a certain way, and in addition, alleviating the fear of dying, reducing fear and anxiety.
What I've never been is anti-scientific. Years of medical training led me to believe that if you stick to a scientific approach - follow scientific methods in laboratory research - then many, if not all, questions about the universe that do not have an answer now will be solved to one degree or another. In other words, there were no unexplained phenomena - there were just "scientific facts" waiting to be investigated. Create the right scientific approach, and you will find the answer - that's how I thought then.
Any student who focuses his attention on the field of scientific knowledge knows that the scientific method of research is a systematic collection of the results of objective observation known as "data." Only that information that has been received and processed in the most careful and impartial manner can be further used to increase scientific knowledge. As for medicine, we owe all the modern advances in diagnostics and treatment to just such data - systematized, meticulously collected and processed in the most objective way. Moreover, only those doctors who can most successfully assimilate and apply scientific knowledge regarding the nature of the course of the disease have the highest chances of curing a patient if he becomes infected with this disease.
From the very beginning of my studies at the university, I have clearly mastered the basic logic of the scientific approach with regard to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Most of all, of course, I was fascinated by the facets of medicine, which are directly related to the collection, systematization and further use of all kinds of registered medical parameters. Thus, by the end of my studies, my attention was completely turned into a very narrow field of cardiology. In a field that largely relies on the recording and subsequent interpretation of various medical parameters - the interpretation necessary for the effective treatment of various kinds of diseases and, in general, cardiac disorders. This direction seemed to me incredibly attractive, because, with modern equipment, heart diseases seem to be a kind of mosaic: pressures in four chambers of the heart, mathematical relationships that allow us to connect them with each other and determine abnormalities in cardiac activity, as well as X-ray technologies that give an idea of the anatomical features heart disease. Moreover, I began to admit that the only correct information about any natural phenomena begins with the collection of relevant data, interpreting which, you can further draw correct conclusions.
1976 ended my first year in cardiology at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I was deeply in love with the study of the nuances of clinical cardiology and preferred certain research in this field. At the same time, my wife and I joined the local Methodist church. One spring Sunday, Sarah Kreutziger, a psychiatrist-social worker from the University, presented a book that caught her eye at our Sunday School for adults. Life After Life by Raymond Moody, filled with several strange testimonies from people near death. Great interest was aroused among the participants in the school. Personally, however, I took it without much enthusiasm. My principled scientific consciousness simply could not take seriously such vague descriptions of spirits from the afterlife and the like. As the only doctor presented that morning, I was asked for my opinion at the end of the lesson. The smartest thing I could find to answer at that moment was: "I don't believe in this."
A week later, Sarah called me. She was invited to present Moody's book to a church-wide audience and asked me to participate in the program as a medical advisor. I reminded her how skeptical I was of Moody's findings, but she insisted that my participation in the program was mostly about answering impromptu medical questions related to this kind of topic. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed ...
