Scientists prove whether there is life after death. The soul after death - scientific facts, evidence and real stories
Man is such a strange creature who finds it very difficult to come to terms with the fact that it is impossible to live forever. Moreover, it should be noted that for many immortality is an indisputable fact. More recently, scientists have presented scientific evidence that will satisfy those who are interested in whether there is life after death.
About life after death
Studies have been conducted that bring religion and science together: death is not the end of existence. Because only beyond the border does a person have the opportunity to discover a new form of life. It turns out that death is not the final line and somewhere out there, abroad, there is another life.
Is there life after death?
The first who was able to explain the existence of life after death was Tsiolkovsky. The scientist argued that human existence on earth does not cease as long as the Universe is alive. And the souls that left the “dead” bodies are indivisible atoms that wander throughout the Universe. This was the first scientific theory concerning the immortality of the soul.
But in the modern world, belief in the existence of the immortality of the soul is not enough. Humanity to this day does not believe that death cannot be overcome, and continues to look for weapons against it.
American anesthesiologist, Stuart Hameroff, claims that life after death is real. When he performed in the program “Through a Tunnel in Space,” he spoke about the immortality of the human soul, that it is made from the fabric of the Universe.
The professor is convinced that consciousness has existed since the Big Bang. It turns out that when a person dies, his soul continues to exist in space, taking on the form of some kind of quantum information that continues to “spread and flow in the Universe.”
It is with this hypothesis that the doctor explains the phenomenon when a patient experiences clinical death and sees “white light at the end of the tunnel.” Professor and mathematician Roger Penrose developed a theory of consciousness: inside neurons there are protein microtubules that accumulate and process information, thereby continuing their existence.
There are no scientifically based, 100% facts that there is life after death, but science is moving in this direction, conducting various experiments.
If the soul were material, then it would be possible to influence it and force it to desire what it does not want, in exactly the same way as one can force a person’s hand to make a movement familiar to it.
If everything in people was material, then all people would feel almost the same, since their bodily similarity would prevail. Seeing a picture, listening to music or learning about the death of a loved one, people would have the same feelings of pleasure or delight or sadness, just as when pain is caused they experience similar sensations. But people know that when they see the same spectacle, one remains cold, while the other worries and cries.
If matter had the ability to think, then every particle of it should be able to think, and people would realize that there are so many creatures in them who can think, 
How many particles of matter are there in the human body?
In 1907, an experiment was conducted by Dr. Duncan McDougall and several of his assistants. They decided to weigh people dying of tuberculosis in the moments before and after death. Beds with dying people were placed on special ultra-precise industrial scales. It was noted that each of them lost weight after death. It was not possible to scientifically explain this phenomenon, but a version was put forward that this small difference is the weight of the human soul.
Whether there is life after death, and what it is like, can be debated endlessly. But still, if you think about the facts presented, you can find a certain logic in this.
The answer to the question: “Is there life after death?” - all major world religions give or try to give. And if our ancestors, distant and not so distant, saw life after death as a metaphor for something beautiful or, on the contrary, terrible, then it is quite difficult for modern people to believe in Heaven or Hell described in religious texts. People have become too educated, but not to say that they are smart when it comes to the last line before the unknown.
In March 2015, toddler Gardell Martin fell into an icy creek and was dead for more than an hour and a half. Less than four days later, he left the hospital alive and well. His story is one of those that encourage scientists to reconsider the very meaning of the concept of “death.”
At first it seemed to her that she just had a headache - but like she had never had a headache before.
22-year-old Carla Perez was expecting her second child - she was in her sixth month of pregnancy. At first she was not too scared and decided to lie down, hoping that the headache would go away. But the pain only got worse, and when Perez vomited, she asked her brother to call 911.
Unbearable pain overwhelmed Carla Perez on February 8, 2015, close to midnight. An ambulance transported Carla from her home in Waterloo, Nebraska, to Methodist Women's Hospital in Omaha. There the woman began to lose consciousness, breathing stopped, and doctors inserted a tube into her throat so that oxygen continued to flow to the fetus. A CT scan showed that a massive cerebral hemorrhage created enormous pressure in the woman’s skull.
Perez suffered a stroke, but the fetus, surprisingly, was not harmed; his heart continued to beat confidently and evenly, as if nothing had happened. At about two o'clock in the morning, a repeat tomography showed that intracranial pressure irreversibly deformed the brain stem.
“Seeing this,” says Tiffany Somer-Sheley, a doctor who saw Perez during both her first and second pregnancies, “everyone realized that nothing good could be expected.”
Carla found herself on the precarious line between life and death: her brain stopped functioning without a chance of recovery - in other words, she died, but the vital functions of the body could be maintained artificially, in this case, to allow the 22-week fetus to develop to the stage where it will be able to exist independently.
There are more and more people who, like Carla Perez, are in a borderline state every year, as scientists understand more and more clearly that the “switch” of our existence does not have two on/off positions, but much more, and between white and black there is room for many shades. In the “gray zone” everything is not irrevocable, sometimes it is difficult to determine what life is, and some people cross the last line, but return - and sometimes talk in detail about what they saw on the other side.
“Death is a process, not an instant,” writes resuscitator Sam Parnia in Erasing Death: The heart stops beating, but the organs do not die that very minute. In fact, the doctor writes, they can remain intact for quite a long time, meaning that for a long time "death is completely reversible."
How can one whose name is synonymous with mercilessness be reversible? What is the nature of the transition through this gray area? What happens to our consciousness?
In Seattle, biologist Mark Roth is experimenting with putting animals into artificial suspended animation using chemical compounds that slow their heart rate and metabolism to levels similar to those observed during hibernation. His goal is to make people who have suffered a heart attack “a little immortal” until they overcome the consequences of the crisis that brought them to the brink of life and death.
In Baltimore and Pittsburgh, trauma teams led by surgeon Sam Tisherman are conducting clinical trials in which patients with gunshot and stab wounds are lowered in body temperature to slow bleeding long enough to receive stitches. These doctors use cold for the same purpose that Roth uses chemicals: to temporarily "kill" patients in order to ultimately save their lives.
In Arizona, cryopreservation specialists keep the bodies of more than 130 of their clients frozen - also a form of "border zone." They hope that sometime in the distant future, perhaps a few centuries from now, these people can be thawed and revived, and by then medicine will be able to cure the diseases from which they died.
In India, neuroscientist Richard Davidson studies Buddhist monks who have entered a state known as thukdam, in which biological signs of life disappear but the body appears to remain intact for a week or longer. Davidson is trying to record some activity in the brains of these monks, hoping to find out what happens after the blood circulation stops.
And in New York, Sam Parnia talks excitedly about the possibilities of “delayed resuscitation.” He says cardiopulmonary resuscitation works better than is commonly believed, and under certain conditions—when body temperature is lowered, chest compressions are properly regulated in depth and rhythm, and oxygen is administered slowly to avoid tissue damage—some patients can be brought back to life even after their heart had stopped beating for several hours, and often without long-term negative consequences. Now a doctor is exploring one of the most mysterious aspects of returning from the dead: why do so many people who have experienced clinical death describe how their consciousness was separated from their body? What can these sensations tell us about the nature of the “border zone” and about death itself?
According to Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, the role of oxygen at the border between life and death is highly controversial. “As early as the 1770s, as soon as oxygen was discovered, scientists realized that it was essential for life,” says Roth. - Yes, if you greatly reduce the concentration of oxygen in the air, you can kill the animal. But, paradoxically, if you continue to reduce the concentration to a certain threshold, the animal will live in suspended animation.”
Mark showed how this mechanism works using the example of soil-dwelling roundworms - nematodes, which can live at an oxygen concentration of only 0.5 percent, but die when it is reduced to 0.1 percent. However, if you quickly pass this threshold and continue to reduce the oxygen concentration - to 0.001 percent or even less - the worms fall into a state of suspended animation. In this way, they escape when harsh times come for them - which is reminiscent of animals hibernating for the winter. Deprived of oxygen, creatures fallen into suspended animation seem to be dead, but this is not so: the flame of life still glimmers in them.
Roth attempts to control this condition by injecting test animals with an "elemental reducing agent" - such as iodide salt - which significantly reduces their need for oxygen. He will soon try this method on people, to minimize the damage treatment can cause to patients after a heart attack. The idea is that if iodide salt slows oxygen metabolism, it may help avoid ischemia-reperfusion injury to the myocardium. This type of damage due to excess supply of oxygen-rich blood to areas where there was previously a lack of it occurs as a result of treatments such as balloon angioplasty. In a state of suspended animation, the damaged heart will be able to slowly feed on oxygen coming from the repaired vessel, rather than choke on it.
As a student, Ashley Barnett was involved in a serious car accident on a highway in Texas, far from major cities. Her pelvic bones were crushed, her spleen was ruptured, and she was bleeding. In those moments, Barnett recalls, her mind slipped between two worlds: one in which rescuers extracted her from a crumpled car using a hydraulic tool, where chaos and pain reigned; in the other, a white light shone and there was no pain or fear. A few years later, Ashley was diagnosed with cancer, but thanks to her near-death experience, the young woman was confident that she would live. Today Ashley is a mother of three and counsels accident survivors.
The question of life and death, according to Roth, is a question of movement: from the point of view of biology, the less movement, the longer the life, as a rule. Seeds and spores can live for hundreds and thousands of years - in other words, they are practically immortal. Roth dreams of the day when, using a reducing agent like iodide salt (the first clinical trials will begin soon in Australia), it will be possible to make a person immortal "for a moment" - for that very moment when he needs it most, when his heart is in trouble.
However, this method would not help Carla Perez, whose heart never stopped beating for a second. The day after the horrifying results of the CT scan came back, Doctor Somer-Sheley tried to explain to the shocked parents, Modesto and Bertha Jimenez, that their beautiful daughter, a young woman who adored her three-year-old daughter, was surrounded by many friends and loved to dance, had died. brain
It was necessary to overcome the language barrier. The Jimenezes' native language is Spanish, and everything the doctor said had to be translated. But there was another barrier, more complicated than the linguistic one - the very concept of brain death. This term appeared in the late 1960s, when two medical advances coincided: the advent of life-sustaining equipment, which blurred the line between life and death, and advances in organ transplantation, which created the need to make this line as distinct as possible. . Death could not be defined in the old way, only as the cessation of breathing and heartbeat, since artificial respiration machines could maintain both indefinitely. Is the person connected to such a device alive or dead? If he is disabled, when is it morally right to remove his organs to transplant them into someone else? And if the transplanted heart beats again in another breast, is it possible to assume that the donor was truly dead when his heart was cut out?
To discuss these delicate and difficult issues, a commission was convened at Harvard in 1968, which formulated two definitions of death: the traditional, cardiopulmonary, and a new one, based on neurological criteria. Among these criteria that are used today to determine the fact of brain death, there are three most important: coma, or complete and sustained absence of consciousness, apnea, or the inability to breathe without a ventilator, and the absence of brain stem reflexes, which is determined by simple tests: you can rinse the patient's ears with cold water and check whether the eyes move, or squeeze the nail phalanges with a hard object and see if the facial muscles react, or apply pressure to the throat and bronchi, trying to evoke a cough reflex.
This is all quite simple and yet counterintuitive. “Patients who are brain dead do not appear dead,” James Bernath, a neurologist at Dartmouth Medical College, wrote in the American Journal of Bioethics in 2014. “It contradicts our life experience to call a patient dead whose heart continues to beat, blood flows through the vessels and internal organs function.” The article, which aims to clarify and reinforce the concept of brain death, appeared just as the medical stories of two patients were widely discussed in the American press. The first, Jahi McMath, a teenager from California, suffered acute oxygen deprivation during tonsillectomy, and her parents refused to accept the diagnosis of brain death. The other, Marlyse Muñoz, was a pregnant woman whose case was fundamentally different from Carla Perez's. Relatives did not want her body to be artificially kept alive, but the hospital administration did not listen to their demand, because they believed that Texas law obliges doctors to preserve the life of the fetus. (The court later ruled in favor of the relatives.)
...Two days after Carla Perez's stroke, her parents, along with the father of their unborn child, arrived at Methodist Hospital. There, in the conference room, 26 clinic employees were waiting for them - neurologists, palliative care and ethicists, nurses, priests, social workers. The parents listened intently to the words of the translator, who explained to them that the tests showed that their daughter’s brain had stopped functioning. They learned that the hospital was offering to keep Perez alive until her fetus was at least 24 weeks old—that is, until it had at least a 50-50 chance of surviving outside the womb. With luck, doctors said, they It will be possible to maintain vital functions even longer, increasing the likelihood that the baby will be born with each passing week.
Perhaps at that moment Modesto Jimenez remembered a conversation with Tiffany Somer-Sheley - the only one in the entire hospital who knew Carla as a living, laughing, loving woman. The night before, Modesto had taken Tiffany aside and quietly asked just one question.
“No,” Dr. Somer-Sheley replied. “Most likely, your daughter will never wake up.” These were perhaps the most difficult words of her life. “As a physician, I understood that brain death is death,” she says. “From a medical point of view, Carla was already dead at that moment.” But looking at the patient lying in the intensive care unit, Tiffany felt that it was almost as difficult for her to believe in this indisputable fact as it was for the parents of the deceased. Perez looked as if she had just undergone successful surgery: her skin was warm, her chest was rising and falling, and the fetus in her stomach was moving - apparently completely healthy. Then, in a crowded conference room, Carla's parents told the doctors: yes , they realize that their daughter is brain dead and she will never wake up. But they added that they would pray for un milagro - a miracle. Just in case.
During a family picnic on the shores of Sleepy Hollow Lake in upstate New York, Tony Kikoria, an orthopedic surgeon, tried to call his mother. A thunderstorm began, and lightning struck the phone and passed through Tony's head. His heart stopped. Kikoria recalls feeling himself leaving his own body and moving through the walls towards a bluish-white light to connect with God. Returning to life, he suddenly felt drawn to playing the piano and began recording melodies that seemed to “download” into his brain. In the end, Tony came to the conclusion that his life was spared so that he could broadcast “music from heaven” to the world.
The return of a person from the dead - what is this if not a miracle? And, I must say, such miracles sometimes happen in medicine.
The Martins know this first hand. Last spring, their youngest son Gardell visited the kingdom of the dead when he fell into an icy stream. The large Martin family - husband, wife and seven children - lives in rural Pennsylvania, where the family owns a large plot of land. Children love to explore the area. On a warm day in March 2015, two older boys went for a walk and took Gardell, who was not yet two years old, with them. The kid slipped and fell into a stream flowing a hundred meters from the house. Noticing the disappearance of their brother, the frightened boys tried for some time to find him themselves. As time went…
By the time the rescue team reached Gardell (a neighbor pulled him out of the water), the baby's heart had not been beating for at least thirty-five minutes. The rescuers began performing external cardiac massage and did not stop for a minute throughout the 16 kilometers that separated them from the nearest Evangelical Community Hospital. The boy’s heart failed to start, and his body temperature dropped to 25 °C. Doctors prepared Gardell to be transported by helicopter to Geisinger Medical Center, 29 kilometers away, in Danville. The heart still didn't beat.
“He showed no signs of life,” recalls Richard Lambert, a pediatrician in charge of administering pain medications at the medical center and a member of the resuscitation team waiting for the plane. “He looked like... Well, in general, his skin was darkened, his lips were blue...” Lambert's voice fades as he recalls this terrible moment. He knew that children who drowned in icy water sometimes came back to life, but he had never heard of this happening to babies who had not shown signs of life for so long. To make matters worse, the boy's blood pH level was critically low - a sure sign of imminent organ failure.
...The resuscitator on duty turned to Lambert and his colleague Frank Maffei, director of the intensive care unit at the Geisinger Center Children's Hospital: maybe it was time to give up trying to revive the boy? But neither Lambert nor Maffei wanted to give up. The circumstances were generally suitable for a successful return from the dead. The water was cold, the child was small, attempts to resuscitate the boy began a few minutes after he drowned, and have not stopped since then. “Let's continue, just a little longer,” they told their colleagues.
And they continued. Another 10 minutes, another 20 minutes, then another 25. By this time, Gardell wasn't breathing, and his heart hadn't beat for over an hour and a half. “A limp, cold body with no signs of life,” Lambert recalls. However, the resuscitation team continued to work and monitor the boy’s condition. The doctors performing external cardiac massage changed every two minutes - a very difficult procedure if performed correctly, even when the patient has such a tiny chest. Meanwhile, other intensivists inserted catheters into Gardell's femoral and jugular veins, stomach and bladder, pouring warm fluids into them to gradually raise his body temperature. But this seemed to be of no use.
Rather than stop resuscitation completely, Lambert and Maffei decided to move Gardell to surgery to put him on a heart-lung machine. This most drastic method of warming the body was a last ditch attempt to get the baby's heart beating again. After treating his hands before the operation, the doctors checked his pulse again.
Incredible: he appeared! I felt a heartbeat, weak at first, but even, without the characteristic rhythm disturbances that sometimes appear after a prolonged cardiac arrest. Just three and a half days later, Gardell left the hospital with his family offering prayers to heaven. His legs barely obeyed him, but otherwise the boy felt great.
After a head-on collision between two cars, student Tricia Baker ended up in a hospital in Austin, Texas, with a broken spine and severe blood loss. When the operation began, Trisha felt like she was hanging from the ceiling. She clearly saw a straight line on the monitor - her heart had stopped beating. Baker then found herself in a hospital hallway, where her grief-stricken stepfather was buying a candy bar from a vending machine; it was this detail that subsequently convinced the girl that her movements were not a hallucination. Today, Trisha teaches creative writing and is confident that the spirits that accompanied her on the other side of death guide her in life.
Gardell is too young to describe what he felt while he was dead for 101 minutes. But sometimes people saved thanks to persistent and high-quality resuscitation, returning to life, talk about what they saw, and their stories are quite specific - and frighteningly similar to one another. These stories have been the subject of scientific study numerous times, most recently as part of Project AWARE, led by Sam Parnia, director of critical care research at Stony Brook University. Since 2008, Parnia and his colleagues have reviewed 2,060 cases of cardiac arrest that occurred in 15 American, British and Australian hospitals. In 330 cases, patients survived, and 140 survivors were interviewed. In turn, 45 of them reported that they were in some form of consciousness during resuscitation procedures.
Although most could not remember the details of what they felt, others' stories were similar to those found in best-selling books like Heaven is for Real: time sped up or slowed down (27 people), they experienced peace (22), a separation of mind from body (13), joy (9), saw a bright light or a golden flash (7). Some (the exact number is not given) reported unpleasant sensations: they were scared, it seemed that they were drowning or that they were being carried somewhere deep under water, and one person saw “people in coffins that were buried vertically in the ground.”
Parnia and his co-authors wrote in the medical journal Resuscitation that their study provides an opportunity to advance our understanding of the variety of mental experiences that are likely to accompany death after circulatory arrest. According to the authors, the next step is to examine whether and how these experiences, which most researchers call near-death experiences (Parnia prefers the term "after-death experiences"), affect surviving patients after recovery. he has cognitive problems or post-traumatic stress. What the AWARE team didn't explore was the typical effect of a near-death experience—an increased sense that your life has meaning and meaning.
Survivors of clinical death often talk about this feeling - and some even write entire books. Mary Neal, an orthopedic surgeon from Wyoming, mentioned this effect when speaking to a large audience at the Rethinking Death symposium at the New York Academy of Sciences in 2013. Neal, author of To Heaven and Back, recounted how she went to the bottom while kayaking down a mountain river in Chile 14 years ago. At that moment, Mary felt her soul separating from her body and flying over the river. Mary recalls: “I walked along an amazingly beautiful road leading to a majestic building with a dome, from where I knew for sure there would be no return, and I couldn’t wait to get to it as soon as possible.”
Mary was at that moment able to analyze how strange all her sensations were, she remembers wondering how long she had been under water (at least 30 minutes, as she later learned), and consoled herself with the fact that her husband and children would be good without it. The woman then felt her body being pulled out of the kayak, felt both her knee joints were broken and saw CPR being administered to her. She heard one of the rescuers calling her: “Come back, come back!” Neal recalled that upon hearing this voice, she felt “extreme irritation.”
Kevin Nelson, a neurologist at the University of Kentucky who took part in the discussion, was skeptical - not about Neal's memories, which he recognized as vivid and genuine, but about their interpretation. “This is not the feeling of a dead person,” Nelson said during the discussion, also objecting to Parnia's point. “When a person experiences such sensations, his brain is very alive and very active.” According to Nelson, what Neal felt could be explained by the so-called “REM sleep invasion,” when the same brain activity that is characteristic of him during dreams for some reason begins to manifest itself in some other circumstances not related to sleep - for example, during sudden oxygen deprivation. Nelson believes that near-death experiences and the feeling of separation of the soul from the body are caused not by dying, but by hypoxia (oxygen deficiency) - that is, loss of consciousness, but not life itself.
There are other psychological explanations for near-death experiences. At the University of Michigan, a team of researchers led by Jimo Borjigin measured brain waves of electromagnetic radiation after cardiac arrest in nine rats. In all cases, high-frequency gamma waves (those that scientists associate with mental activity) became stronger - and even clearer and more orderly than during normal wakefulness. Perhaps, the researchers write, this is a near-death experience - increased activity of consciousness that occurs during the transition period before final death?
Even more questions arise when studying the already mentioned tukdam - a state when a Buddhist monk dies, but for another week or even more his body does not show signs of decomposition. Is he still conscious? Is he dead or alive? Richard Davis of the University of Wisconsin has been studying the neurological aspects of meditation for many years. All these questions have been on his mind for a long time - especially after he had a chance to see a monk in a tukdam at the Deer Park Buddhist monastery in Wisconsin.
“If I happened to walk into that room, I would think he was just sitting there, deep in meditation,” Davidson says, a note of awe in his voice over the phone. “His skin looked absolutely normal, without the slightest sign of decomposition.” The sensation caused by the close proximity of this dead man led Davidson to begin researching the phenomenon of tukdam. He brought the necessary medical equipment (electroencephalographs, stethoscopes, etc.) to two field research sites in India and trained a team of 12 Tibetan doctors to examine the monks (starting when they were clearly alive) to find out whether their some activity in the brain after death.
“Many monks probably go into a state of meditation before they die, and it somehow persists after death,” says Richard Davidson. “But how this happens and how it can be explained eludes our everyday understanding.”
Davidson's research, based on the principles of European science, aims to achieve a different, more subtle understanding of the problem, an understanding that could shed light not only on what happens to the monks in tukdam, but also on any person who crosses the border between life and death.
Typically, decomposition begins almost immediately after death. When the brain stops functioning, it loses the ability to maintain the balance of all other body systems. So in order for Carla Perez to continue carrying her baby after her brain stopped working, a team of more than 100 doctors, nurses and other hospital staff had to act as a kind of conductor. They monitored blood pressure, kidney function and electrolyte balance devices around the clock, and constantly made changes to the fluids given to the patient through the catheters.
But even performing the functions of Perez’s brain-dead body, the doctors could not perceive her as dead. Everyone, without exception, treated her as if she were in a deep coma, and upon entering the ward they greeted her, calling the patient by name, and when leaving they said goodbye.
They did this partly out of respect for Perez's family's feelings—the doctors didn't want to give the impression that they were treating her like a "baby container." But sometimes their behavior went beyond ordinary politeness, and it became clear that the people caring for Perez actually treated her as if she were alive.
Todd Lovgren, one of the leaders of this medical team, knows what it's like to lose a child - his daughter, who died in early childhood, the eldest of his five children, would have turned twelve. “I wouldn’t respect myself if I didn’t treat Carla like a real person,” he told me. “I saw a young woman with nail polish, her mother combing her hair, her hands and toes warm... Whether her brain was functioning or not, I don’t think she stopped being human.”
Speaking more as a father than as a doctor, Lovgren admits that he felt as if something of Perez's personality was still present in the hospital bed - even though, after a follow-up CT scan, he knew that the woman's brain was not just not functioning ; large portions of it began to die and disintegrate (However, the doctor did not test for the last sign of brain death, apnea, because he feared that by disconnecting Perez from the ventilator for even a few minutes, he could harm the fetus).
On February 18, ten days after Perez's stroke, it was discovered that her blood had stopped clotting normally. It became clear: dying brain tissue penetrates the circulatory system - another evidence in favor of the fact that she will not recover. By then, the fetus was 24 weeks old, so doctors decided to transfer Perez from the main campus back to Methodist Hospital's obstetrics and gynecology department. They managed to temporarily overcome the problem of blood clotting, but they were ready to perform a caesarean section at any moment - as soon as it became clear that they could not delay, as soon as even the semblance of life that they managed to maintain began to disappear.
According to Sam Parnia, death is, in principle, reversible. Cells inside the human body, he says, usually don't die immediately with the body: some cells and organs can remain viable for several hours and maybe even days. The question of when a person can be declared dead is sometimes decided according to the personal views of the physician. During his years as a student, Parnia says, cardiac massage was stopped after five to ten minutes, believing that after this time the brain would still be irreparably damaged.
However, resuscitation scientists have found ways to prevent death of the brain and other organs even after cardiac arrest. They know that lowering body temperature contributes to this: ice water helped Gardell Martin, and in some intensive care units, the patient is specially cooled each time before starting a cardiac massage. Scientists also know how important persistence and perseverance are.
Sam Parnia compares critical care to aeronautics. Throughout human history, it seemed that people would never fly, and yet in 1903 the Wright brothers took to the skies in their airplane. It's amazing, Parnia notes, that it took just 66 years from that first 12-second flight to the moon landing. He believes that similar successes can be achieved in intensive care medicine. As for the resurrection from the dead, the scientist thinks, here we are still at the stage of the first airplane of the Wright brothers.
And yet doctors are already able to win life from death in amazing, hope-giving ways. One such miracle occurred in Nebraska on Easter Eve, around noon on April 4, 2015, when a boy named Angel Perez was born by Caesarean section at Methodist Women's Hospital. Angel was born because doctors were able to keep his brain-dead mother alive for 54 days, long enough for the fetus to develop into a small but normal—astonishingly normal—newborn weighing 1,300 grams. This child turned out to be the miracle his grandparents had prayed for.
All living things obey the laws of nature: they are born, reproduce, wither and die. But the fear of death is inherent only in man, and only he thinks about what will happen after physical death. It is much easier in this regard for fanatical believers: they are absolutely sure of the immortality of the soul and the meeting with the Creator. But today scientists have scientific evidence whether there is life after death, and evidence from real people who have experienced clinical death, showing the continued existence of the soul after the death of the body.
Historical facts
When faced with an inexorable death that takes away a loved one in the prime of life, it is difficult not to fall into despair. It is impossible to come to terms with the loss in this case, and the soul requires at least a tiny hope of meeting in another life or in another world. At the same time, human consciousness is structured in such a way that it believes facts and evidence, therefore one can only talk about the possible rebirth of the soul based on eyewitness testimony.
Scientific researchers from almost all countries of the world have scientific facts about the soul after death, since today even the exact weight of the soul is known - 21 grams, obtained experimentally. It can also be said with confidence that death is not the end of life, it is a transition to another form of existence with the subsequent rebirth of the soul after death. Facts inexorably speak of constantly repeating earthly incarnations of the same soul in different bodies.
Scientists - psychologists and psychotherapists believe that many mental illnesses have their roots in past lives and carry their nature from there. It is great that no one (with rare exceptions) remembers their past lives and past mistakes, otherwise real life would be spent correcting and correcting past experiences, but there would be no real spiritual growth, the purpose of which is reincarnation.
The first mention of this phenomenon is in the ancient Indian Vedas, written five thousand years ago. This philosophical and ethical teaching considers two possible miracles that occur with the physical shell of a person: the miracle of dying, that is, the transition into another substance, and the miracle of birth, that is, the appearance of a new body to replace the worn-out one.
Swedish scientist Jan Stevenson, who has been studying the phenomenon of reincarnation for many years, has come to a stunning conclusion: people who move from one earthly shell to another have the same physical characteristics and defects in all cases of rebirth. That is, having received some kind of flaw on his body in one of his earthly rebirths, he transfers it to subsequent incarnations.
One of the first scientists to talk about the immortality of the soul was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who argued that the soul is an atom of the Universe that cannot die, since its existence is due to the existence of the Cosmos.
But modern man is not satisfied with just statements; he needs facts and evidence about the possibilities of being born again and again going through the entire earthly path from birth to death.
Scientific evidence
Human life expectancy is steadily increasing as the efforts of scientists around the world are aimed at improving the quality of life. But at the same time, along with an understanding of the inevitability of death, the inquisitive mind of a person requires new knowledge about the afterlife, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. And this new thing in the science of life after death appears to convince humanity: there is no death, there is only a change, the transition of the “subtle” body from the “rough physical” shell into the Universe. The evidence for this statement is:
It cannot be said that all this scientific evidence proves with one hundred percent certainty the continuation of life even after the end of the earthly path, but everyone tries to answer such a sensitive question on their own.
Existence outside of your body
Many hundreds and thousands of people who have experienced coma or clinical death recall an amazing phenomenon: their etheric body leaves the physical and seems to hover above its shell, watching everything that happens.
Today we can definitely say that there is life after death. Eyewitness evidence equally answers: yes, it exists. Every year, the number of people who confidently talk about their amazing journeys outside the physical shell and amaze doctors with the details noticed during their adventures increases.
For example, Washington-based singer Pam Reynolds spoke about her visions during a unique brain surgery that she underwent several years ago. She clearly saw her body on the operating table, I saw the doctors’ manipulations and heard their conversations, which after waking up I was able to convey. It is difficult to convey the state of the doctors who were shocked by her story.
Memory of past births
In the philosophical teachings of many ancient civilizations, the postulate was put forward that each person has his own destiny and is born for his own business. He cannot die until he has fulfilled his destiny. And today it is believed that a person returns to an active life after a serious illness, because he has not realized himself and is obliged to fulfill his obligations to the Universe or God.
- Some psychoanalysts believe that only people who do not believe in God or in reincarnation, and who constantly feel the fear of death, do not realize that they are dying and, after finishing their earthly journey, find themselves in a “gray space” in which the soul is in constant fear and misunderstanding.
- If we recall the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and his teaching about subjective idealism, then according to his teaching the soul passes from body to body and remembers only some especially memorable, vivid cases from past births. But this is precisely how Plato explains the emergence of brilliant works of art and scientific achievements.
- Nowadays, almost everyone knows what the phenomenon of “déjà vu” is, in which a person physically, psychologically, and emotionally remembers something that did not actually happen to him in real life. Many psychologists believe that in this case, vivid memories of a past life emerge.
In addition, the series of programs “Confession of a Dead Man about Life after Death” was successfully shown on television screens, several popular science documentaries were shot and many articles were written on a given topic.
This burning question still worries and worries humanity. Probably only true believers can confidently answer this question positively. For everyone else, it remains open.
Scientists have evidence of the existence of life after death.
They discovered that consciousness can continue after death.
Although this topic is viewed with great skepticism, there are testimonies from people who have had this experience that will make you think about it.
Although these conclusions are not definitive, you may begin to doubt that death is, in fact, the end of everything.
Is there life after death?
1. Consciousness continues after death
Dr. Sam Parnia, a professor who has studied near-death experiences and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, believes that a person's consciousness can survive brain death when there is no blood flow to the brain and there is no electrical activity.
Since 2008, he has collected extensive evidence of near-death experiences that occurred when a person's brain was no more active than a loaf of bread.
Based on the visions, conscious awareness persisted for up to three minutes after the heart stopped, although the brain usually shuts down within 20 to 30 seconds after the heart stops.
2. Out-of-body experience
You may have heard people talk about the feeling of separation from your own body, and they seemed like a fantasy to you. American singer Pam Reynolds spoke about her out-of-body experience during brain surgery, which she experienced at the age of 35.
She was placed in an induced coma, her body was cooled to 15 degrees Celsius, and her brain was virtually deprived of blood supply. In addition, her eyes were closed and headphones were inserted into her ears, drowning out sounds.
Hovering above her body, she was able to observe her own operation. The description was very clear. She heard someone say, “Her arteries are too small,” while the song “Hotel California” by The Eagles played in the background.
The doctors themselves were shocked by all the details that Pam told about her experience.
3. Meeting with the dead
One of the classic examples of near-death experiences is meeting deceased relatives on the other side.
Researcher Bruce Grayson believes that what we see when we are in a state of clinical death is not just vivid hallucinations. In 2013, he published a study in which he indicated that the number of patients who met deceased relatives far exceeded the number of those who met living people.
Moreover, there have been several cases where people have encountered a dead relative on the other side without knowing that the person had died.
Life after death: facts
4. Borderline Reality
Internationally recognized Belgian neurologist Steven Laureys does not believe in life after death. He believes that all near-death experiences can be explained through physical phenomena.
Laureys and his team expected that near-death experiences would be similar to dreams or hallucinations and would fade from memory over time.
However, he discovered that memories of near-death experiences remain fresh and vivid regardless of the passage of time and sometimes even eclipse memories of actual events.
5. Similarity
In one study, researchers asked 344 patients who had experienced cardiac arrest to describe their experiences in the week following resuscitation.
Of all the people surveyed, 18% had difficulty remembering their experience, and 8-12% gave the classic example of a near-death experience. This means that between 28 and 41 unrelated people from different hospitals recalled essentially the same experience.
6. Personality changes
Dutch researcher Pim van Lommel studied the memories of people who experienced clinical death.
According to the results, many people lost their fear of death and became happier, more positive and more sociable. Almost everyone spoke of near-death experiences as a positive experience that further impacted their lives over time.
Life after death: evidence
7. First-hand memories
American neurosurgeon Eben Alexander spent 7 days in a coma in 2008, which changed his opinion about near-death experiences. He stated that he saw something that was difficult to believe.
He said that he saw light and a melody emanating from there, he saw something similar to a portal into a magnificent reality, filled with waterfalls of indescribable colors and millions of butterflies flying across this scene. However, his brain was switched off during these visions to such an extent that he should not have had any glimpses of consciousness.
Many have questioned Dr. Eben's words, but if he is telling the truth, perhaps his experiences and those of others should not be ignored.
8. Visions of the Blind
They interviewed 31 blind people who had experienced clinical death or out-of-body experiences. Moreover, 14 of them were blind from birth.
However, they all described visual images during their experiences, whether it was a tunnel of light, deceased relatives, or watching their bodies from above.
9. Quantum physics
According to Professor Robert Lanza, all possibilities in the Universe happen simultaneously. But when the “observer” decides to look, all these possibilities come down to one, which happens in our world.
Is there life after death? Probably every person has asked this question at least once in their life. And this is quite obvious, because the unknown scares us the most.
The sacred scriptures of all religions without exception say that the human soul is immortal. Life after death is presented either as something wonderful, or, on the contrary, something terrible in the image of Hell. According to Eastern religion, the human soul undergoes reincarnation - it moves from one material shell to another.
However, modern people are not ready to accept this truth. Everything requires proof. There is a discourse about various forms of life after death. A large amount of scientific and fiction literature has been written, many films have been made, which provide a lot of evidence of the existence of life after death.
We present to your attention 12 real proofs of the existence of life after death.
1: The Mummy's Mystery
In medicine, the fact of death is declared when the heart stops and the body does not breathe. Clinical death occurs. From this condition the patient can sometimes be brought back to life. True, a few minutes after blood circulation stops, irreversible changes occur in the human brain, and this means the end of earthly existence. But sometimes after death some fragments of the physical body seem to continue to live.
For example, in Southeast Asia there are mummies of monks whose nails and hair grow, and the energy field around the body is many times higher than the norm for an ordinary living person. And perhaps they still have something else alive that cannot be measured by medical devices.
2: Forgotten tennis shoe
Many patients who have experienced clinical death describe their sensations as a bright flash, a light at the end of a tunnel, or vice versa - a gloomy and dark room with no way to get out.
An amazing story happened to a young woman, Maria, an emigrant from Latin America, who, in a state of clinical death, seemed to leave her room. She noticed a tennis shoe forgotten by someone on the stairs and, having regained consciousness, told the nurse about it. One can only try to imagine the state of the nurse who found the shoe in the indicated place.
3: Polka Dot Dress and Broken Cup
This story was told by a professor, doctor of medical sciences. His patient's heart stopped during surgery. The doctors managed to get him started. When the professor visited a woman in intensive care, she told an interesting, almost fantastic story. At some point, she saw herself on the operating table and, horrified by the thought that, having died, she would not have time to say goodbye to her daughter and mother, she was miraculously transported to her home. She saw a mother, daughter and a neighbor who came to see them and brought the baby a dress with polka dots.
And then the cup broke and the neighbor said that it was luck and the girl’s mother would recover. When the professor came to visit the young woman’s relatives, it turned out that during the operation a neighbor had actually visited them, who had brought a dress with polka dots, and the cup had broken... Fortunately!
4: Return from Hell
The famous cardiologist, professor at the University of Tennessee, Moritz Rowling, told an interesting story. The scientist, who many times brought patients out of a state of clinical death, was, first of all, a person very indifferent to religion. Until 1977.
This year an incident occurred that forced him to change his attitude towards human life, soul, death and eternity. Moritz Rawlings carried out resuscitation actions, which were not uncommon in his practice, on a young man by means of chest compressions. His patient, as soon as he regained consciousness for a few moments, begged the doctor not to stop.
When he was brought back to life, and the doctor asked what scared him so much, the excited patient replied that he was in hell! And when the doctor stopped, he returned there again and again. At the same time, his face expressed panic horror. As it turns out, there are many such cases in international practice. And this, undoubtedly, makes us think that death only means the death of the body, but not the personality.
Many people who have experienced a state of clinical death describe it as an encounter with something bright and beautiful, but the number of people who have seen lakes of fire and terrible monsters is no less. Skeptics claim that this is nothing more than hallucinations caused by chemical reactions in the human body as a result of oxygen starvation of the brain. Everyone has their own opinion. Everyone believes what they want to believe.
But what about ghosts? There are a huge number of photographs and videos that allegedly contain ghosts. Some call it a shadow or a film defect, while others firmly believe in the presence of spirits. It is believed that the ghost of the deceased returns to earth to complete unfinished business, to help solve the mystery, in order to find peace and tranquility. Some historical facts provide possible evidence for this theory.
5: Napoleon's signature
In 1821. After the death of Napoleon, King Louis XVIII was installed on the French throne. One day, lying in bed, he could not sleep for a long time, thinking about the fate that befell the emperor. The candles burned dimly. On the table lay the crown of the French state and the marriage contract of Marshal Marmont, which Napoleon was supposed to sign.
But military events prevented this. And this paper lies in front of the monarch. The clock on the Church of Our Lady struck midnight. The bedroom door opened, although it was bolted from the inside, and... Napoleon entered the room! He walked up to the table, put on the crown and took the pen in his hand. At that moment, Louis lost consciousness, and when he came to his senses, it was already morning. The door remained closed, and on the table lay a contract signed by the emperor. The handwriting was recognized as genuine, and the document was in the royal archives as early as 1847.
6: Boundless love for mother
The literature describes another fact of the appearance of the ghost of Napoleon to his mother, on that day, May 5, 1821, when he died far from her in captivity. In the evening of that day, the son appeared before his mother in a robe that covered his face, and an icy cold wafted from him. He said only: “May the fifth, eight hundred and twenty-one, today.” And left the room. Only two months later the poor woman learned that it was on this day that her son died. He could not help but say goodbye to the only woman who was his support in difficult times.
7: The Ghost of Michael Jackson
In 2009, a film crew went to the ranch of the late King of Pop Michael Jackson to film footage for the Larry King program. During filming, a certain shadow came into the frame, very reminiscent of the artist himself. This video went live and immediately caused a strong reaction among the singer’s fans, who could not cope with the death of their beloved star. They are sure that Jackson's ghost still appears in his house. What it really was remains a mystery to this day.
8: Birthmark Transfer
Several Asian countries have a tradition of marking a person's body after death. His relatives hope that in this way the soul of the deceased will be reborn again in his own family, and those same marks will appear in the form of birthmarks on the bodies of children. This happened to a boy from Myanmar, the location of a birthmark on his body exactly coincided with the mark on the body of his deceased grandfather.
9: Revived handwriting
This is the story of a little Indian boy, Taranjit Sinngha, who at the age of two began to claim that his name was different, and he used to live in another village, the name of which he could not know, but he called it correctly, like his past name. When he was six years old, the boy was able to remember the circumstances of “his” death. On his way to school, he was hit by a man riding a scooter.
Taranjit claimed that he was a ninth grade student and that day he had 30 rupees with him and his notebooks and books were soaked in blood. The story of the tragic death of the child was completely confirmed, and the handwriting samples of the deceased boy and Taranjit were almost identical.
10: Innate knowledge of a foreign language
The story of a 37-year-old American woman, who was born and raised in Philadelphia, is interesting because, under the influence of regressive hypnosis, she began to speak pure Swedish, considering herself a Swedish peasant.
The question arises: Why can’t everyone remember their “former” life? And is it necessary? There is no single answer to the eternal question about the existence of life after death, and there cannot be.
11: Testimonies of people who experienced clinical death
This evidence is, of course, subjective and controversial. It is often difficult to assess the meaning of statements such as “I was separated from my body,” “I saw a bright light,” “I flew into a long tunnel,” or “I was accompanied by an angel.” It is difficult to know how to respond to those who say that in a state of clinical death they temporarily saw heaven or hell. But we know for sure that the statistics of such cases are very high. The general conclusion about them is the following: approaching death, many people felt that they were coming not to the end of existence, but to the beginning of some new life.
12: Resurrection of Christ
The strongest evidence for the existence of life after death is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even in the Old Testament, it was predicted that the Messiah would come to Earth, who would save His people from sin and eternal destruction (Isa. 53; Dan. 9:26). This is exactly what Jesus' followers testify that He did. He voluntarily died at the hands of the executioners, “was buried by a rich man,” and three days later left the empty tomb in which he lay.
According to witnesses, they saw not only the empty tomb, but also the resurrected Christ, who appeared to hundreds of people over 40 days, after which he ascended to heaven.
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