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Proof of Paradise. The real experience of a neurosurgeon

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Anatoly Nekrasov - Mother's love

The topic of excessive maternal love is global in nature, only in some peoples it is manifested weaker, while in others it is stronger, but it is present and gives rise to many problems all over the world. From small family troubles and divorces to the death of children and complex social problems and wars - that's a range of situations where the main reason is excessive maternal love. Do not rush to deny! Read, think, observe life, and you will certainly agree with me and yourself will find many confirmation of what was said. This will turn your worldview upside down and you will become wiser. And most importantly, if you do not deny and approach this topic creatively, then you can change a lot in your life and in the life of your children for the better.

Mother's love

Eben Alexander

Proof of paradise. True story neurosurgeon's travels to the afterlife

PROOF OF HEAVEN: A NEUROSURGEON'S JOURNEY INTO THE AFTERLIFE

A person should rely on what is, and not on what supposedly should be.

Albert Einstein

As a child, I often dreamed that I was flying.

Usually it happened like this: I stood in the courtyard, looking at the stars, and suddenly the wind picked me up and carried me up. It turned out to get off the ground by itself, but the higher I climbed, the more the flight depended on me. If I was overexcited, too fully surrendered to the sensations, then in a big way I flopped to the ground. But if I managed to stay calm and cool, I would take off faster and faster - straight into the starry sky.

Perhaps from these dreams grew my love for parachutes, missiles and airplanes - for everything that could return me to the transcendental world.

When my family and I flew somewhere on an airplane, I did not come off the window from takeoff to landing. In the summer of 1968, when I was fourteen years old, I spent all the money I earned from mowing the lawns on gliding lessons. I was taught by a guy named Goose Street, and our classes were in Strawberry Hill, a little grassy "airfield" west of Winston Salem, the town I grew up in. I can still remember my heart pounding as I pulled the big red handle, dropped the tow rope that tied my glider to the plane, and banked towards the airfield. Then for the first time I felt myself truly independent and free. Most of my friends find this feeling behind the wheel of a car, but three hundred meters above the ground, it feels a hundred times sharper.

In 1970, already in college, I joined the team at the University of North Carolina's Skydiving Club. It was like a secret brotherhood - a group of people who are doing something exceptional and magical. The first time I jumped, I was afraid to shiver, and the second time I was even more afraid. Only on the twelfth jump, when I stepped out of the plane's door and flew over three hundred meters before the parachute opened (my first jump with a ten-second delay), I felt like I was in my native element. By the time I graduated from college, I had three hundred and sixty-five jumps and nearly four hours of free fall. And although in 1976 I stopped jumping, I still - clearly, as if in reality - dreamed of long jumps, and it was wonderful.

The best jumps were obtained in the late afternoon, when the sun was leaning towards the horizon. It is difficult to describe what I felt at the same time: a feeling of closeness to something that I could not really name, but which I always lacked. And it's not about solitude - our jumps had nothing to do with loneliness. We jumped five, six, and sometimes ten or twelve people at a time, lining up figures in free fall. The larger the group and the more complex the figure, the more interesting it is.

One wonderful autumn day in 1975, my university team and I gathered at a friend's place at the parachute center to practice group jumping. Having worked hard, we finally jumped out of the Beachcraft D-18 at an altitude of three kilometers and made a snowflake of ten people. We managed to unite in a perfect figure and fly more than two kilometers like that, fully enjoying an eighteen-second free fall in a deep crevasse between two tall cumulus clouds. Then, at an altitude of one kilometer, we scattered and parted on our trajectories to deploy the parachutes.

It was dark when we landed. However, we hurriedly jumped into another plane, took off quickly and managed to catch the last rays of the sun in the sky in order to make the second sunset jump. This time two newbies jumped with us - this was their first attempt to participate in building a figure. They had to join the figure from the outside, and not be at its base, which is much easier: in this case, your task is to simply fall down while others maneuver towards you. It was an exciting moment both for them and for us, experienced skydivers, because we created a team, shared our experience with those with whom we could make even larger figures in the future.

I was to be the last to join the six-pointed star we were going to build over the runway of a small airport near Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. The guy who jumped in front of me was called Chuck, and he had a lot of experience building pieces in free fall. At an altitude of more than two kilometers, we were still swimming in the rays of the sun, and on the ground below us, street lamps were already blinking. Jumping in the twilight is always amazing, and this jump promised to be just wonderful.

- Three, two, one ... let's go!

I fell out of the plane literally a second after Chuck, but I had to hurry to catch up with my friends when they began to form a figure. For about seven seconds I rushed upside down like a rocket, which allowed me to descend at a speed of almost one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour and catch up with the rest.

In a dizzying flight upside down, almost reaching critical speed, I smiled, admiring the sunset for the second time in a day. On approaching the others, I planned to apply an "air brake" - cloth "wings" that stretched from wrist to hip and sharply slowed down the fall if deployed at high speed. I spread my arms out to the sides, letting go of my wide sleeves and braking in the air stream.

However, something went wrong.

Flying up to our "star", I saw that one of the newcomers was overclocked too much. Perhaps the fall between the clouds frightened him - made him remember that at a speed of sixty meters per second he was approaching a huge planet, half-hidden by the thickening night mist. Instead of slowly clinging to the edge of the "star," he slammed into it, so that it crumbled, and now five of my friends were tumbling in the air at random.

Usually, in group long jumps at a height of one kilometer, the figure disintegrates, and everyone scatters as far as possible from each other. Then everyone gives the go-ahead with his hand as a sign of readiness to open the parachute, looks up to make sure that there is no one above him, and only after that he pulls the pull rope.

But they were too close to each other. The skydiver leaves a trail of high turbulence and low pressure. If another person gets caught in this trail, his speed will immediately increase, and he may fall on someone below. This, in turn, will give acceleration to both of them, and the two of them can already crash into the one who is under them. In other words, this is how disasters happen.

I bent over and flew away from the group so as not to fall into this tumbling mass. I maneuvered until I was directly above the "spot" - a magical point on the ground, above which we had to open our parachutes for a leisurely two-minute descent.

I looked around and was relieved - the disoriented paratroopers were moving away from each other, so that the deadly pile was small, slowly dissipating.

However, to my surprise, I saw Chuck head towards me and stop right below me. With all this group acrobatics, we passed the six hundred meters mark faster than he expected. Or maybe he considered himself a lucky man who didn’t have to scrupulously follow the rules.

“He must not see me,” before this thought flashed through my head, a bright pilot chute flew out of Chuck's backpack. He caught an air stream sweeping at a speed of almost two hundred kilometers per hour, and fired directly at me, pulling the main dome behind him.

From the moment I saw Chuck's pilot chute, I literally had a split second left to react. Because in a moment I would have collapsed onto the main dome that had opened, and then - very likely - onto Chuck himself. If at that speed I hit his arm or leg, I would have ripped them off completely. If I fell directly on him, our bodies would fly to pieces.

People say that time slows down in such situations, and they are right. My mind was tracking what was happening in microseconds, as if I were watching a movie in very slow motion.

I came face to face with the world of consciousness, which exists absolutely independently of the limitations of the physical brain.

Sf came face to face with the world of consciousness, which exists absolutely independently of the limitations of the physical brain.

As soon as I saw the pilot chute, I pressed my arms to my sides and straightened my body in a vertical jump, slightly bending my legs. This position gave me an acceleration, and the bend provided the body with horizontal movement - at first a slight, and then like a gust of wind that caught me, as if my body had become a wing. I was able to rush past Chuck, right in front of his flamboyant landing parachute.

Reality Without a Veil by Ziad Masri is an amazing book. Albert Einstein wrote that “Reality is just an illusion, albeit a very intrusive one,” and Ziad Masri did everything to collect evidence of this for you. Each concept in the book builds on the previous one, and all the elements add up to a single picture. Seeing the holistic reality at the energetic and spiritual levels, you will be able to take a fresh look at life, the world around, the Universe and the very meaning of being.

An excerpt from the chapter "The Path of the Soul" read below.

The term "near death experiences" (NDE) was coined by Dr. Raymond Moody in a highly entertaining book "Life after life"... According to the definition formulated by the International Association for Near-Death Research, NDE is what a person experiences a dying episode; the experience of people who were declared clinically dead, who were very close to the state of physical death or were in a situation where death is highly probable or seems imminent. Survivors of this experience often argue that the term near-death incorrect, since it was exactly state of death, and not just close to her, and indeed, many of them were declared clinically dead by the doctors.

Without exaggeration, millions of people around the world, including such prominent personalities as Carl Jung and George Lucas, have experienced confirmed near-death experiences, so we have a vast database of empirical data on the basis of which certain conclusions can be drawn. A huge number of reports about NDE came from children, who always talk about what they see, in the most ingenuous and unbiased way possible.

In the vast majority of cases, near-death experiences are accompanied by feelings of love, joy, peace, and bliss. Only a relatively small number of people report negative experiences associated with feelings of fear. At the same time, NDEs are invariably characterized as superreal - even more real than earthly life.

But most interestingly, the millions of NDEs and reports of experiences in hypnosis, as it turns out, have a lot in common. In both cases, we are talking about an out-of-body state, full awareness (consciousness, however, remains outside the body, and sometimes even looks at it from above), a light tunnel (that is, a "wormhole" leading to another dimension), meeting with already deceased loved ones, contact with loving spiritual beings, recapitulation of life, incredibly beautiful landscapes and an amazing sense of life's purpose and universal knowledge.

Despite the obvious transformative effect that such experiences usually have on people, and overwhelming physical evidence of being out of the body in a state of complete loss of consciousness or even clinical death (in particular, survivors of the experience of near-death know what doctors, nurses, etc. relatives, even if they were in a different room; or spiritual guides show them events of the future, which later exactly come true), most doctors are still skeptical of NDEs, considering them hallucinations produced by the brain in a temporary traumatic state of clinical death. However, definitive proof that these experiences have not hallucinatory, cited by Dr. Eben Alexander, who documented his own NDEs in an incredible book “Proof of Paradise. Real experience of a neurosurgeon ".

Neurosurgeon Alexander was a staunch skeptic before he himself had a near-death experience. Many of his patients reported profound NDEs, but he always brushed aside their experiences, attributing them to hallucinosis. But the doctor had to change his views abruptly when he contracted a rare virus and fell into a coma for several days. This case is interesting and stands out among others in that this virus infect the brain, as a result of which Alexander's organ is completely out of order, and the idle brain is not even able to create hallucinations. Therefore, if consciousness were really a product of brain activity, as many neurosurgeons believe, then in the situation of Dr. Alexander any experiences would be completely excluded. His brain could not produce any thoughts or emotions, and, of course, all the electrical activity of the central nervous system, which was monitored throughout the week of coma, showed absolutely nothing. And yet what he experienced was not "nothing" at all.

Instead of not seeing or feeling anything, the doctor became a participant in extremely amazing events. He visited the other world and experienced incredible experiences - despite the fact that his brain was completely turned off. He could not imagine all this or see it in a dream, because his brain, infected with a rare virus, was inactive. Since from the point of view of science, this circumstance excludes any hallucinations, as well as suggestion and imagination, the only conclusion follows from this: Dr. Alexander was outside the body as pure consciousness and the world about which he talks, and everything that he saw, are real 100%.

The message of the scientist, if we take into account the facts stated by him, is extremely fascinating and revolutionary scientifically. It unequivocally proves not only that we never lose consciousness, but also that awareness is capable of taking on a variety of unique forms (Alexander writes that he was just a point of awareness in different time periods, devoid of ideas about ourselves and personal identity, which confirms scientific position, considered by us earlier: everything in the universe endowed with awareness). In addition, it indicates the existence of a completely real world, which in the most literal sense is Paradise.

The story of Dr. Alexander is especially interesting in that it, being scientific confirmation of the near-death experiences of other people and the research of hypnotherapists such as Newton, describes not just the spheres of life-between-lives, but, apparently, the very real paradise- a perfect world of supreme beauty - and allows us to look into an amazing area beyond physical existence.

Eben Alexander

Proof of Paradise

A person should see things as they are, and not as he wants to see them.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

When I was little, I often flew in my sleep. It usually went like this. I dreamed that I was standing at night in our yard and looking at the stars, and then suddenly I separated from the ground and slowly climbed up. The first few inches of the ascent into the air happened spontaneously, without any involvement on my part. But soon I noticed that the higher I climb, the more the flight depends on me, more precisely, on my condition. If I was violently jubilant and excited, I would suddenly fall down, hitting the ground hard. But if I perceived the flight calmly, as something natural, then I was rapidly carried away higher and higher into the starry sky.

Perhaps partly because of these flights in a dream, I subsequently developed a passionate love for airplanes and missiles - and in general for any aircraft that could again give me the feeling of an immense airspace. When I had a chance to fly with my parents, no matter how long the flight was, it was impossible to tear me away from the window. In September 1968, at the age of fourteen, I donated all of my lawn mowing money to a glider lesson taught by a guy named Goose Street on Strawberry Hill, a small "airfield" overgrown with grass near my hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I can still remember how excitedly my heart was pounding as I pulled on the dark red round handle that unhooked the cable connecting me to the towing plane and my glider rolled onto the take-off field. For the first time in my life, I experienced an unforgettable feeling of complete independence and freedom. Most of my friends loved driving madly for this, but in my opinion, nothing could compare to the thrill of flying at a thousand feet.

In the 1970s, while attending college at the University of North Carolina, I became involved in skydiving. Our team seemed to me like a secret brotherhood - after all, we had special knowledge that was not available to everyone else. The first jumps were given to me with great difficulty, I was overcome by real fear. But by the twelfth jump, when I stepped out the door of the plane to fly over a thousand feet in free fall, before opening the parachute (this was my first long jump), I already felt confident. In college, I did 365 parachute jumps and have flown more than three and a half hours in free fall, performing acrobatic figures in the air with twenty-five companions. And although I stopped jumping in 1976, I continued to have joyful and very vivid dreams about skydiving.

Most of all I liked jumping in the late afternoon, when the sun began to tilt towards the horizon. It is difficult to describe my feelings during such jumps: it seemed to me that I was getting closer and closer to something that was impossible to define, but which I was passionately longing for. This mysterious "something" was not an ecstatic feeling of complete loneliness, because we usually jumped in groups of five, six, ten or twelve people, making up various figures in free fall. And the more complex and difficult the figure was, the more delight I was overwhelmed.

In 1975, on a beautiful autumn day, the guys from the University of North Carolina and several friends from the Parachute Training Center got together to practice group jumping with the construction of figures. On our penultimate jump from the D-18 Beechcraft light aircraft at 10,500 feet, we made a ten-person snowflake. We managed to pull ourselves together in this figure even before the 7000 feet mark, that is, we enjoyed the flight in this figure for a whole eighteen seconds, falling into the gap between the masses of high clouds, after which at an altitude of 3500 feet we unclenched our hands, deviated from each other and opened the parachutes.

By the time we landed, the sun was already very low, above the earth itself. But we quickly climbed into another plane and took off again, so we were able to capture the last rays of the sun and make another jump before its full sunset. This time, two newcomers took part in the jump, who for the first time had to try to join the figure, that is, fly up to it from the outside. Of course, the easiest thing to do is to be the main, basic parachutist, because he just needs to fly down, while the rest of the team has to maneuver in the air to get to him and grab his hands with him. Nevertheless, both newcomers rejoiced at the difficult test, like we, already experienced parachutists: after having trained the young guys, later we could make jumps with even more complex figures together with them.

Out of a group of six to paint a star over the runway of a small airfield near Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, I was the last to jump. In front of me was a guy named Chuck. He had extensive experience in aerial group acrobatics. At 7,500 feet, the sun was still shining on us, but the streetlights were already gleaming below. I've always loved dusk jumping and this one promised to be just great.

I had to leave the plane about a second after Chuck, and in order to catch up with the others, my fall had to be very fast. I decided to dive into the air, as in the sea, upside down and in this position fly the first seven seconds. This would allow me to fall nearly a hundred miles per hour faster than my comrades, and to be level with them immediately after they began to build a star.

Usually during these jumps, having descended to an altitude of 3500 feet, all paratroopers disengage their arms and disperse as far as possible from each other. Then everyone waves their hands, signaling that they are ready to open their parachute, looks up to make sure that there is no one above them, and only then pulls the pull rope.

Three, two, one ... March!

One by one, four parachutists left the plane, followed by me and Chuck. Flying upside down and picking up speed in free fall, I rejoiced that for the second time in a day I saw the sunset. Approaching the team, I was about to brake sharply in the air, throwing my arms out to the sides - we had suits with wings made of fabric from the wrists to the hips, which created powerful resistance, fully deploying at high speed.

But I didn't have to do it.

Falling plumb in the direction of the figure, I noticed that one of the guys was approaching it with an ingot quickly. I don’t know, maybe he was frightened by the rapid descent into a narrow gap between the clouds, recalling that he was rushing at a speed of two hundred feet per second towards a giant planet, poorly visible in the deepening darkness. One way or another, but instead of slowly joining the group, he flew into a whirlwind at her. And the five remaining paratroopers tumbled randomly in the air. Plus, they were too close to each other.

This guy left a powerful turbulent trail behind him. This air flow is very dangerous. As soon as another skydiver hits him, the speed of his fall will increase rapidly, and he will crash into the one who is under him. This in turn will give strong acceleration to both parachutists and hurl them at the one who is even lower. In short, a terrible tragedy will happen.

Bending over, I deviated from the randomly falling group and maneuvered until I was directly above the "dot", the magical point on the ground, above which we were to deploy our parachutes and begin a slow two-minute descent.

I turned my head and was relieved to see that the other jumpers were already moving away from each other. Chuck was among them. But to my surprise, it moved in my direction and soon hovered right below me. Apparently, during the indiscriminate fall, the group climbed 2,000 feet faster than Chuck had expected. Or maybe he considered himself lucky, who may not follow the established rules.

"He shouldn't see me!" Before this thought flashed through my head, a colored pilot chute jerked up behind Chuck's back. The parachute caught the wind around Chuck, blowing at a speed of one hundred and twenty miles per hour, and carried it towards me, while simultaneously pulling the main parachute.

From the moment the pilot chute opened over Chuck, I had a fraction of a second left to react. In less than a second, I should have crashed into his main parachute and, most likely, into himself. If at such a speed I hit his arm or leg, then I will simply tear it off and at the same time receive a fatal blow myself. If we collide with bodies, we will inevitably break.

They say that in situations like this, it seems that everything happens much slower, and this is true. My brain was capturing what was happening, which took only a few microseconds, but perceived it like a slow motion movie.

As soon as the pilot chute flew over Chuck, my hands pressed themselves to my sides, and I rolled upside down, slightly bent over.

The bending of the body made it possible to increase the speed a little. In the next instant, I made a sharp dash to the side horizontally, which turned my body into a powerful wing, which allowed a bullet to zip past Chuck just in front of his main parachute deployed.

I raced past him at over one hundred and fifty miles an hour, or two hundred and twenty feet per second. He hardly had time to notice the expression on my face. Otherwise, he would have seen incredible amazement on him. By some miracle, I was able to react in a matter of a fraction of a second to a situation that, if I had time to think it over, would have seemed simply insoluble!

And yet ... And yet I managed it, and as a result, Chuck and I landed safely. I got the impression that when faced with an extreme situation, my brain acted like some kind of super-powerful calculator.

How did it happen? During my more than twenty years of work as a neurosurgeon - when I studied the brain, observed its work and performed operations on it - I often wondered this question. And in the end, I came to the conclusion that the brain is such a phenomenal organ that we do not even know about its incredible abilities.

Now I already understand that the real answer to this question is much more complicated and fundamentally different. But in order to realize this, I had to go through events that completely changed my life and worldview. This book and is dedicated to these events. They proved to me that, no matter how wonderful an organ the human brain was, it didn’t save me on that fateful day. What intervened the moment Chuck's main parachute began to open was another, deeply hidden side of my personality. It was she who managed to work so instantly, because, unlike my brain and body, she exists outside of time.

It was she who made me, a boy, so rush to the sky. This is not only the most developed and wisest side of our personality, but also the deepest, intimate. However, for most of my adult life, I didn't believe it.

However, now I believe, and from the following story you will understand why.

//__ * * * __//

My profession is a neurosurgeon.

I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1976 with a degree in chemistry and in 1980 received my doctorate from the School of Medicine.

Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon with 25 years of experience, professor who taught at Harvard Medical School and other major American universities, shared with readers his impressions of his journey to the underworld.

This case is truly unique. Struck with severe bacterial meningitis, he inexplicably recovered from a seven-day coma. A highly educated physician with vast practical experience, who before not only did not believe in the afterlife, but also did not allow the thought of it, experienced the transfer of his "I" to the higher worlds and faced such amazing phenomena and revelations there that, having returned to earthly life , considered it his duty as a scientist and healer to tell the whole world about them.

On November 10, 2008, as a result of a very rare disease, I plunged into a coma for seven whole days. All this time, my neocortex - the new cortex, that is, the upper layer of the cerebral hemispheres, which, in essence, makes us human - was turned off, did not work, practically did not exist.

When a person's brain is turned off, it also ceases to exist. In my specialty, I had to hear many stories of people who had an unusual experience, usually after cardiac arrest: they allegedly found themselves in some mysterious and beautiful place, talked with deceased relatives and even saw the Lord God himself.

All these stories, of course, were very interesting, but, in my opinion, they were fantasy, pure fiction. What causes these "otherworldly" experiences that people who have experienced clinical death talk about? I didn’t say anything, but deep down I was sure that they were connected with some kind of disturbance in the functioning of the brain. All our experiences and ideas originate in consciousness. If the brain is paralyzed, disabled, you cannot be conscious.

Because the brain is a mechanism that primarily produces consciousness. The destruction of this mechanism means the death of consciousness. For all the incredibly complex and mysterious functioning of the brain, it's just like two and two. Unplug the power cord and the TV will stop working. And the show ends, no matter how you like it. Something like this I would have said before my own brain turned off.

When I was in a coma, my brain wasn’t working properly — it wasn’t working at all. I now think that it was a completely non-functioning brain that led to the depth and intensity of the near-death experience (ACS) I had during my coma. Most of the stories about ACS come from people who have experienced temporary cardiac arrest. In these cases, the neocortex also turns off for a while, but does not undergo irreversible damage - if, no later than four minutes later, the supply of oxygenated blood to the brain is restored with the help of cardiopulmonary resuscitation or due to spontaneous restoration of cardiac activity. But in my case, the neocortex showed no signs of life! I was confronted with the reality of a world of consciousness that existed completely independently of my dormant brain.

Personal experience of clinical death was a real explosion for me, a shock. As a neurosurgeon with extensive experience in scientific and practical work, I was better than others able not only to correctly assess the reality of what I experienced, but also to draw appropriate conclusions.

These findings are incredibly important. My experience has shown me that the death of the organism and the brain does not mean the death of consciousness, that human life continues even after the burial of his material body. But most importantly, it continues under the gaze of God, who loves all of us and cares about each of us and about the world where the universe itself and everything in it ultimately goes.

The world where I found myself was real - so real that, compared to this world, the life that we lead here and now is completely ghostly. However, this does not mean that I do not value my present life. On the contrary, I value her even more than before. Because now I understand its true meaning.

Life is not meaningless. But from here we are not able to understand it, in any case, not always. The story of what happened to me during my stay in a coma is full of the deepest meaning. But it is rather difficult to talk about it, since it is too alien to our usual ideas.

Darkness, but visible darkness - as if you are immersed in mud, but you see through it. Yes, perhaps this darkness is better compared to thick jelly-like mud. Transparent, but cloudy, vague, causing suffocation and claustrophobia.

Consciousness, but without memory and without feeling oneself - like a dream, when you understand what is happening around you, but you do not know who you are.

And another sound: a low, rhythmic beat, distant, but strong enough to feel every beat. Heartbeat? Yes, it looks like, but the sound is more dull, more mechanical - it resembles the knock of metal on metal, as if somewhere far away some giant, an underground blacksmith strikes with a hammer on an anvil: the blows are so powerful that they cause vibration of the earth, dirt, or something incomprehensible substance in which I was.

I didn’t have a body — at least I didn’t feel it. I was just… there, in this pulsating and rhythmic darkness. At that time, I might have called it the primordial darkness. But then I did not know these words. Actually, I didn't know the words at all. The words used here appeared much later, when, after returning to this world, I wrote down my memories. Language, emotions, the ability to reason - all this was lost, as if I was thrown far back, to the initial point of the origin of life, when a primitive bacterium had already appeared, invading my brain in an unknown way and paralyzing its work.

How long have I been in this world? I have no idea. It is almost impossible to describe the sensation you experience when you find yourself in a place where there is no sense of time. When I got there later, I realized that I (whatever that “I” was) had always been and will be there.

I didn't mind that. And why would I object if this existence was the only one I knew? Remembering nothing better, I was not very interested in exactly where I was staying. I remember that I wondered whether I would survive or not, but indifference to the outcome only increased the feeling of my own invulnerability. I was not aware of the principles of the world in which I was, but I was in no hurry to learn them. Who cares?

I can't say exactly when it started, but at some point I became aware of some objects around me. They resembled both plant roots and blood vessels in an incredibly huge, filthy womb. Glowing with a dull red light, they stretched from somewhere far above to somewhere far down. Now I can compare it to how a mole or earthworm, deep underground, somehow could see the intertwined roots of grasses and trees around it.

That is why, recalling this place later, I decided to name it Habitat as the Worm sees it (or, in short, the Land of the Worm). For a long time, I assumed that the image of this place might have been inspired by some kind of memory of the state of my brain, which had just been attacked by a dangerous and aggressive bacteria.

But the more I thought about this explanation (I remind you that it was much later), the less I saw its meaning. Because - how difficult it is to describe all this if you yourself have not been to this place! - when I was there, my consciousness was not clouded or distorted. It was simple. limited. There I was not a man. But he was not an animal either. I was an earlier and more primitive being than an animal or a man. I was just a lonely spark of consciousness in a timeless reddish-brown space.

The longer I stayed there, the more uncomfortable I became. At first, I plunged so deeply into this visible darkness that I did not feel the difference between me and this simultaneously vile and familiar matter surrounding me. But gradually the feeling of deep, timeless and boundless immersion gave way to a new feeling: that in fact I am not at all a part of this underworld, but simply somehow got into it.

From this abomination, the muzzles of terrible animals emerged like bubbles, uttered a howl and squeal, then disappeared. I heard an intermittent, dull growl. Sometimes this growling turned into vague rhythmic tunes, simultaneously frightening and strangely familiar - as if at some point I myself knew and hummed them.

Since I did not remember my previous existence, my stay in this country seemed endless. How long did I spend there? Months? Years? Eternity? One way or another, finally, the moment came when my former indifferent carelessness was completely swept away by a chilling horror. The more distinctly I felt myself - as something separate from the cold, dampness and darkness that surrounded me - the more disgusting and terrible seemed to me the animal faces emerging from this darkness. The steady thudding muffled by the distance grew louder and harder, reminiscent of the labor rhythm of an army of underground troll workers doing endless, unbearably monotonous work. The movement around me became more noticeable and palpable, as if snakes or other worm-like creatures were making their way past in a dense group, sometimes touching me with smooth skin or a kind of hedgehog thorns.

Then I smelled a stench that mingled the smells of feces, blood and vomit. In other words, the smell of biological origin, but dead, not living creature. As my consciousness sharpened more and more, fear, panic horror seized me more and more. I didn't know who or what I was, but this place was disgusting and alien to me. It was necessary to get out of there.

Before I had time to ask this question, something new appeared from above from the darkness: it was neither cold, nor dead, nor dark, but was the complete opposite of all these qualities. Even if I had spent the rest of my days on this, I would not have been able to pay tribute to the entity that was now approaching me, and even partially describe how beautiful it was.

But I keep trying.

Something appeared in the darkness.

Slowly rotating, it emitted the finest rays of golden-white light, and gradually the darkness surrounding me began to split and disintegrate.

Then I heard a new sound: a lively sound of beautiful music, rich in richness of tones and shades. As this clear white light descended on me, the music grew louder and drowned out a monotonous thump that seemed to be the only thing I heard here for ages.

The light came nearer and nearer, as if revolving around an invisible center and spreading around beams and threads of pure white radiance, which, now I clearly saw, glittered with gold.

Then something else appeared in the very center of the glow. I strained my mind, trying my best to understand what it is.

Hole! Now I was looking not at the slowly spinning light, but through it. As soon as I realized this, I began to rapidly climb up.

There was a whistle, reminiscent of the whistle of the wind, and in a moment I flew out into this hole and found myself in a completely different world. I have never seen anything more strange and at the same time more beautiful.

Shining, quivering, full of life, stunning, evoking selfless delight. I could endlessly pile up definitions to describe what this world looked like, but they are simply not enough in our language. I felt like I had just been born. He was not reborn and not reborn, but was born for the first time.

Beneath me was an area covered with dense, luxurious vegetation, like the Earth. This was the Earth, but at the same time it was not. The feeling can be compared to what if your parents brought you to some place where you lived for several years in early childhood. You don't know this place. In any case, so it seems to you. But, looking around, you feel how something attracts you, and you understand that in the very depths of your soul there is a memory of this place, you remember it and are glad that you are here again.

I flew over forests and fields, rivers and waterfalls, from time to time I noticed people below and children playing cheerfully. People were singing and dancing, sometimes I saw dogs next to them, who also happily ran and jumped. The people were wearing simple but beautiful clothes, and it seemed to me that the colors of these clothes were as warm and vibrant as the grass and flowers that dot the area.

A wonderful, incredible ghostly world.

But only this world was not ghostly. Although I did not know where I was or even who I was, I felt absolutely certain of one thing: the world in which I suddenly found myself was completely real, real.

I can't say exactly how long I flew. (The time in this place differs from the simple linear time on our Earth, and it is hopeless to try to convey it clearly.) But at some point I realized that I was not alone in the heights.

Next to me was beautiful girl with high cheekbones and dark blue eyes. She was dressed in the same simple and loose dress that the people below wore. Her sweet face was framed by golden brown hair. We were flying in the air on some kind of plane, painted with an intricate pattern, shining with indescribably bright colors - it was the wing of a butterfly. In general, millions of butterflies fluttered around us - they formed wide waves, crashing down on green meadows and soaring up again. The butterflies kept together and seemed like a lively and quivering river of flowers flowing in the air. We slowly soared in height, flowering meadows and green forests floated below us, and when we went down to them, buds opened on the branches. The dress on the girl was simple, but its colors - light blue, indigo, light orange and delicate peach - gave rise to the same jubilant and joyful mood as the whole area. The girl looked at me. She had a look that, if you see it for just a few seconds, gives meaning to your whole life up to the present moment, regardless of what happened in it before. This look was not just romantic or friendly. Somehow, mysteriously, something was seen in him immeasurably surpassing all types of love that are familiar to us in our mortal world. He simultaneously radiated all varieties of earthly love - motherly, sisterly, conjugal, daughter, friendly - and at the same time infinitely deeper and more chaste love.

The girl spoke to me without words. Her thoughts penetrated me like an air stream, and I instantly understood their sincerity and truthfulness. I knew this exactly as I knew that the world around me is real, and not at all imaginary, elusive and transient.

All the "said" could be divided into three parts, and in translation into our earthly language, I would express its meaning in approximately the following sentences:

"You are forever loved and protected."

"You have nothing to fear."

"There is nothing you can do wrong."

I felt incredible relief from this message. It’s like I’ve been handed a list of the rules of a game that I’ve played all my life without fully understanding them.

We will show you a lot of interesting things here, ”the girl said, not using words, but sending me their meaning directly. - But then you come back.

I only have one question for this:

Where back?

Remember who is talking to you now. Believe me, I do not suffer from dementia and excessive sentimentality. I know what death looks like. I know human nature and, although not a materialist, I am a pretty decent specialist in my field. I am able to distinguish fantasy from reality, and I know that the experience that I am now trying to convey to you, however, rather vaguely and chaotically, was not only a special, but also the most real experience in my life.

Meanwhile, I was in the clouds. Huge, lush, pinkish-white clouds that stood out brightly against the deep blue sky.

Above the clouds, in incredible heavenly heights, creatures glided in the form of transparent flickering balls, leaving traces like a long train behind them.

Birds? Angels? These words come to my mind now as I write down my memories. However, not a single word from our earthly language can convey the correct idea of these creatures, they were so different from everything that I know. They were more perfect, higher beings.

From above came the rolling and booming sounds, reminiscent of choral singing, and I wondered if these winged creatures were making them. Reflecting on this phenomenon later, I suggested that the joy of these creatures soaring in the heavenly heights was so great that they had to make these sounds - if they did not express their joy in this way, they simply could not contain it. The sounds were palpable and almost material, like raindrops that casually touch your skin.

In this place where I now found myself, hearing and sight did not exist separately. I heard the visible beauty of these silvery creatures above and saw the thrillingly beautiful perfection of their joyous songs. It seemed that here it was simply impossible to perceive anything with hearing and sight, without merging with it in some mysterious way.

And I will emphasize once again that now, looking back, I would say that in that world it was really impossible to look at anything, because the very preposition "on" implies a view from the outside, a certain distance from the object of observation, which was not there ... Everything was perfectly clear and at the same time part of something else, like some kind of curl in the colorful weave pattern of a Persian carpet or a tiny stroke in the pattern of a butterfly's wing.

A warm breeze blew that gently swayed the foliage of the trees on a beautiful summer day and delightfully refreshing. Divine breeze.

I began to mentally question this breeze - and the divine being that I felt was behind it all or was inside it.

"Where is this place?"

Why am I here?

Every time I silently asked a question, it was immediately answered in the form of flashes of light, color, love and beauty, which passed through me in waves. And here's what is important: these flashes did not drown out my questions, absorbing them. They answered them, but without words. I perceived these thoughts-answers directly, with my whole being. But they were different from our earthly thoughts. These thoughts were tangible - hotter than fire and wetter than water - and were transmitted to me in an instant, and I perceived them just as quickly and effortlessly. On Earth, it would take me years to understand them.

I continued to move forward and found myself in an endless void, absolutely dark, but at the same time surprisingly comfortable and peaceful.

In total darkness, it was full of light, emanating, it seemed, a shining ball, whose presence I felt somewhere nearby. The ball was alive and almost as tangible as the chanting of the angelic beings. My position was strangely like the position of the embryo in the womb. The fetus has a silent partner in the womb, the placenta, which nourishes and mediates with the ubiquitous yet invisible mother. In this case, the mother was God, the Creator, the Divine Principle - call it what you want, the Supreme Being, who created the Universe and everything in it. This Being was so close that I almost felt myself merged with Him. And at the same time, I felt Him as something immense and all-embracing, I saw how insignificant and small I am in comparison with Him. In the future, I will often use the word "Om", and not the pronouns "He", "She" or "It" to denote God, Allah, Jehovah, Brahma, Vishnu, the Creator and the Divine Principle. Om - so I called God in my initial notes after the coma; "Om" is the word that in my memory was associated with God. The omniscient, omnipotent and unconditionally loving Om has no gender, and no epithet can convey His essence.

The very incomprehensible immensity that distinguishes me from Ohm, as I understand it, was the reason that Shar was given to me as a companion. Unable to fully comprehend this, I was nevertheless convinced that Shar served as a "translator", a "mediator" between me and this extraordinary being around me. As if I was born in a world immeasurably larger than ours, and the Universe itself was a gigantic cosmic womb, and the Ball (which somehow remained connected with the Girl on the Butterfly's Wing and which in fact was her) guided me in this process.

I kept asking and getting answers. Although the answers were perceived by me not clothed in words, the "voice" of the Being was gentle and - I understand, it may seem strange - reflecting His Personality. It perfectly understood people and possessed their inherent qualities, but on an immeasurably larger scale. It knew me thoroughly and was filled with feelings that, in my mind, were always associated only with people: there was warmth, sympathy, understanding, sadness and even irony and humor in Him.

With the help of the Shara, Om told me that there is not one, but an incomprehensible multitude of universes, but that each of them is based on love. In all universes, evil is also present, but only in small quantities. Evil is necessary, since without it the manifestation of human free will is impossible, and without free will there can be no development - there can be no movement forward, without which we cannot become what God wants us to be.

No matter how terrifying and omnipotent evil may seem in a world like ours, in the picture of the cosmic world, love has a crushing power and, in the end, triumphs.

I have seen an abundance of life forms in these innumerable universes, including those whose intelligence was far more advanced than that of humans. I saw that their scales are incredibly larger than the scales of our Universe, but the only possible way to know these values is to penetrate one of them and feel them on yourself. From a smaller space, they can neither be recognized nor comprehended. In these higher worlds, there are also causes and effects, but they are beyond our earthly understanding. The time and space of our earthly world in the higher worlds are linked with each other by an inextricable and incomprehensible connection for us. In other words, these worlds are not entirely foreign to us, since they are part of the same all-encompassing divine Essence. You can get from the higher worlds to any time and place of our world.

It will take my whole life, if not more, to sort out what I've learned. The knowledge given to me was not taught as in a history or mathematics lesson. Their perception took place directly, they did not need to be memorized and memorized. Knowledge was acquired instantly and forever. They are not lost, as is the case with ordinary information, and I still fully own this knowledge - in contrast to the information received at school.

But this does not mean that I can apply this knowledge with the same ease. After all, now, having returned to our world, I have to pass them through my material brain with its limited capabilities. But they remain with me, I feel their inseparability. For someone who, like me, has diligently accumulated knowledge in the traditional way all his life, the discovery of such a high level of learning provides food for thought for centuries.

Something pulled me. Not as if someone grabbed the hand, but more weakly, less perceptibly. It could be compared to how the mood immediately changes, as soon as the sun disappears behind a cloud. I went back, flew away from the Center. Its luminous black darkness was imperceptibly replaced by the green landscape of the Gate. Looking down, I again saw people, trees, sparkling rivers and waterfalls, and above me in the sky creatures like angels were still hovering.

And my companion was there too. She was, of course, by my side during my journey to the Focus, taking the form of a Ball of Light. But now she has again acquired the image of a girl. She was wearing her former beautiful attire, and when I saw her, I experienced the same joy that a child, lost in a huge strange city, feels when he suddenly sees a familiar face.

We will show you a lot, but then you will come back.

This message, wordlessly instilled in me at the entrance to the inscrutable darkness of the Center, was recalled now. Now I already understood what "back" meant.

This is the Land of the Worm, where my odyssey began.

But this time it was different. Descending into the gloomy darkness and already knowing what was above it, I did not feel anxiety.

As the magnificent music of the Gate subsided, giving way to the pulsating beats of the lower world, I perceived all its phenomena by hearing and sight. This is how an adult person sees a place where he once experienced unspeakable horror, but now he is no longer afraid. The gloomy darkness, the emerging and disappearing animal faces, the roots descending from above, intertwined like arteries, no longer inspired fear, since I understood - understood without words - that I did not belong to this world, but simply visited it.

But why am I here again?

The answer came as instantly and silently as in the upper, shining world. This adventure was a kind of excursion, a great overview of the invisible, spiritual side of existence. And like any good-quality excursion, it included all floors and levels.

When I returned to the lower kingdom, the peculiar flow of that time continued. A faint, very distant idea of it can be formed by remembering the feeling of time in a dream. Indeed, in a dream it is very difficult to determine what happens "before" and what - "after." You can dream and know what will happen next, although you have not experienced it yet. The “time” of the lower kingdom is something like that, although I must emphasize that what was happening to me had nothing to do with the confusion of earthly dreams.

How long have I been in "underworld" this time? I have no exact idea - there is no way to measure this period of time. But I know for sure that after returning to the lower world, I could not understand for a long time that I was now able to direct the direction of my movement - that I was no longer a prisoner of the lower world. By concentrating my efforts, I could return to the higher realms. At some point in the dark depths, I really wanted to return the Flowing Melody. After several attempts to remember the melody and the spinning Ball of Light that produced it, beautiful music sounded in my mind. Enchanting sounds pierced the gelatinous gloom, and I began to rise.

So I discovered that in order to move towards the upper world, it is enough just to know something and think about it.

The thought of the Flowing Melody caused its sound and fulfilled the desire to be in the upper world. The more I knew about the upper world, the easier it was for me to be there again. During the time that I spent outside my body, I developed the ability to move back and forth without hindrance, from the murky darkness of the Land of the Worm to the emerald glow of the Gate and into the black but shining darkness of the Concentration. How many times I have made such movements, I cannot say - again, because of the discrepancy between the sense of time there and here, on Earth. But each time I reached the Center, I moved deeper than before, and learned more and more - without words - the interconnectedness of all that exists in the higher worlds.

This does not mean that I saw something like the entire Universe, traveling from the Land of the Worm to the Center. The main thing, each time returning to the Center, I learned a very important lesson - the incomprehensibility of everything that exists - neither its physical, that is, the visible, side, nor the spiritual, that is, invisible (which is immeasurably larger than the physical), not to mention the infinite number of other universes, that exist or have ever existed.

But all this did not matter, because I already knew the only important truth. The first time I received this knowledge from a beautiful companion on the wing of a butterfly was on my first appearance at the Gate. This knowledge was put into me in three silent phrases:

"You are loved and cherished."

"You have nothing to fear."

"You can't do anything wrong."

If you express them in one sentence, then it turns out:

"You are loved."

And if you shorten this sentence to one word, you get, naturally:

"Love".

Surely love is the foundation of everything. Not some abstract, incredible, illusory love, but the most ordinary love familiar to everyone - the same love with which we look at our wife and children and even at our pets. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous, not selfish, but unconditional and absolute. This is the most primary, incomprehensibly blissful truth that lives and breathes in the heart of everything that exists and will exist. And a person who does not know this love and does not invest it in all his actions is not able to even remotely understand who he is and why he lives.

Say, not a very scientific approach? Sorry, but I disagree with you. Nothing can convince me that this is not only the only, most important truth in the entire Universe, but also the only most important scientific fact.

For several years now, I have been meeting and talking with those who study or have experienced clinical death themselves. And I know that the concept of "unconditional, absolute love" is very common among them. How many people are able to understand what this really means?

Why is this concept used so often? Because a lot of people have seen and experienced what I am. But, like me, upon their return to our earthly world, they lacked words, precisely words, to convey the feeling that words simply cannot be expressed. It's like trying to write a novel using only part of the alphabet.

The main difficulty that most of these people face is not how to adapt again to the limitations of earthly existence - although this is quite difficult - but that it is incredibly difficult to convey what the love that they experienced there really is. upstairs.

Deep down, we already know her. As Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz can always return home, we have the opportunity to reconnect with this idyllic world. We just don't remember this, because in the phase of our physical existence, the brain blocks, hides the boundless cosmic world to which we belong, like light in the morning rising sun dwarfs the stars. Imagine how meager, limited our understanding of the universe would be if we never saw the star-studded night sky.

We only see what the filtering brain allows us to see. The brain - especially its left hemisphere, which is responsible for logical thinking and mastery of speech, generating a sense of common sense and a clear sense of self - is a barrier to higher knowledge and experience.

I am sure that this is a critical moment in our existence. It is necessary to recover much of this essential knowledge hidden from us while we live on Earth, while our brain (including the left, analytical hemisphere) is fully functioning. The science to which I have devoted so many years of my life does not contradict what I learned up there. But still too many do not think so, because members of the scientific community, who have become hostages of the materialistic view, stubbornly insist that science and spirituality cannot coexist.

They are deluded. That is why I am writing this book. It is necessary to educate people about an ancient but highly important truth. Compared to her, all other episodes of my history are secondary - I mean the mystery of the disease, how I retained consciousness in a different dimension during the week of coma, and how I managed to recover and completely restore all brain functions.

The first time I found myself in the Land of the Worm, I did not realize myself, did not know who I was, what I was, and even whether I was at all. I am there - this is a tiny point of consciousness in a viscous, black and muddy something that seemed to have no end or beginning.

However, then I realized myself, understood that I belong to God and that nothing - absolutely nothing - could take it away from me. The (false) fear that we might somehow be separated from God is the cause of all and all fears in the Universe, and the cure for them - I received initially at the Gates and finally at the Center - was a clear, confident understanding that nothing and never cannot separate us from God. This knowledge - it remains the only important fact that I have ever learned - deprived the Land of the Worm of terror and made it possible to see it for what it was: not a very pleasant, but necessary part of the universe.

Many, like me, have been to the upper world, but most of them, being outside the earthly body, remembered who they were. They knew their name and did not forget that they lived on Earth. They realized that their relatives were waiting for their return. Many more met dead friends and relatives there, and they immediately recognized them.

Survivors of clinical death told that pictures of their life passed before them, they saw good and bad deeds that they did during their life.

I have not experienced anything like this, and if you analyze all these stories, it will become clear that my clinical death is unusual. I was completely independent of my earthly body and personality, which contradicts the typical phenomena of clinical death.

I understand that it is somewhat strange to say that I did not know who I was or where I came from. After all, how could I recognize all these incredibly complex and beautiful things, how could I see a girl next to me, flowering trees, waterfalls and villages without realizing that it was me, Eben Alexander, who was experiencing all this? How could I understand all this, but not remember that on Earth I was a doctor, a doctor, had a wife and children? A person who has seen trees, rivers and clouds not for the first time, being in the Gate, but many times, starting from childhood, when he grew up in a very specific and earthly place, in the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

The best I can suggest as an explanation is that I was in a state of partial but beneficial amnesia. That is, he forgot about himself some important facts, but only benefited from this short-term forgetfulness.

What did I gain from forgetting myself, earthly? This allowed me to fully and completely penetrate the worlds lying outside our world, and not worry about what was left behind. All the time I was in other worlds, I was a soul that has nothing to lose. I did not yearn for my homeland, did not grieve for lost people. I came out of nowhere and had no past, so I perceived the circumstances in which I found myself with complete calmness - even the initially gloomy and disgusting Land of the Worm.

And since I had completely forgotten my mortal identity, I was given full access to the true cosmic soul, who I truly am, like the rest of us. I will say again that in a sense, my experience can be compared with a dream, in which you remember something about yourself, but you completely forget something. And yet, this analogy is only partially true, since - I am not tired of reminding - both the Gate and the Center were not in the least imaginary, illusory, but, on the contrary, extremely real, truly existing. One gets the impression that my lack of memory of earthly life during my stay in the higher worlds was deliberate. Exactly. At the risk of oversimplifying the problem, I will say: I was allowed to die, as it were, more completely and irrevocably, and to penetrate into another reality deeper than most patients who have suffered clinical death.

Reading the vast literature on the near-death experience proved to be very important in understanding my coma journey. I don’t want to seem somehow special and self-confident, but I will say that my experience was really peculiar and specific and thanks to it, now, three years later, after reading mountains of literature, I know for sure that penetration into the higher worlds is a step-by-step process and requires that man is freed from all attachments that he had before.

It was easy for me to do this, since I did not have any earthly memories, and the only time I experienced pain and sadness was when I had to return to Earth from where I began my journey.

Most modern scientists are of the opinion that human consciousness is digital information, that is, almost the same kind of information that a computer processes. While some of this information - like watching a picturesque sunset, listening to a beautiful symphony, even love - may seem very serious and special to us compared to the countless other particles stored in our brain, it is actually an illusion. All particles are qualitatively the same. Our brain shapes external reality by processing information it receives from the senses and transforming it into a rich digital carpet. But our sensations are just a model of reality, not reality itself. Illusion.

Of course, I also held this point of view. I remember, back in medical school, I had to hear arguments in favor of the opinion that consciousness is nothing more than a very complex computer program. The debaters argued that ten billion neurons in the brain, which are in constant excitement, are capable of providing consciousness and memory throughout a person's life.

To understand how the brain can block our access to knowledge about the higher worlds, one must admit - at least hypothetically - that the brain itself does not produce consciousness. Rather, it is a kind of safety valve or lever that switches the high, “nonphysical” consciousness that we have in the nonphysical worlds to a lower one with limited abilities during our earthly life. From an earthly point of view, this has a certain meaning. All the time the brain is awake, the brain works hard, taking away from the flow of sensory information entering it the material that a person needs for existence, and therefore the loss of the memory that we are only temporarily on Earth allows us to live more effectively “here and now”. Habitual life already gives us too much information that needs to be assimilated and used for our own benefit, and the constant memory of the worlds outside of earthly life would only slow down our development. If we already had all the information about the spiritual world at our disposal, it would be even more difficult for us to live on Earth. This does not mean that we should not think about it, but if we are too acutely aware of its grandeur and immensity, then this can adversely affect our behavior in earthly life. From the point of view of a great design (and now I know for sure that the universe is a great design), it would not be so important for a person endowed with free will to make the right decision in the face of evil and injustice if, living on Earth, he remembered all the charm and the splendor of the upper world awaiting him.

Why am I so sure of this? For two reasons. First, it was shown to me (by the beings who taught me at the Gate and at the Center). Secondly, I actually experienced it. Being outside the body, I received knowledge about the nature and structure of the Universe, which is higher than my comprehension. And I received it mainly because, not remembering my earthly life, I was able to perceive this knowledge. Now that I am back on Earth and realize my physical essence, the seeds of this knowledge about the higher worlds are hidden from me again. And yet they are there, I feel their presence. In the earthly world, it will take years for these seeds to sprout. More precisely, it will take me years to understand with my mortal physical brain everything that I so easily and quickly assimilated in the upper world, where the brain did not exist. And yet I am confident that if I work hard, knowledge will continue to unfold.

It is not enough to say that there is a huge gap between our modern scientific understanding of the universe and the reality that I saw. I still love physics and cosmology, with the same interest I study our vast and wonderful Universe. But now I have a more accurate idea of what it means "immense" and "wonderful". The physical side of the universe is a speck of dust compared to its invisible spiritual component. Earlier, during scholarly conversations, I did not use the word "spiritual", but now I believe that we should not avoid this word in any way.

From the Shining Focus I got a clear idea of what we call "dark energy" or "dark matter", as well as other, more fantastic components of the Universe, to which people will direct their inquiring minds only after many centuries.

But this does not mean that I am able to explain my ideas. Paradoxically, I myself am still trying to understand them. Perhaps, The best way to convey part of my experience is to say that I have a presentiment that in the future a large number of people will have access to even more important and vast knowledge. Now, an attempt at any explanation can be compared to how if a chimpanzee, who for one day turned into a human and gained access to all the wonders of human knowledge, and then returned to his relatives, would like to tell them what it means to speak several foreign languages, what is calculus and the immense scale of the universe.

Up there, as soon as I had a question, an answer immediately appeared to it, like a flower blooming nearby. As in the Universe, no physical particle exists separately from another, just as there is no question without an answer in it. And these answers were not in the form of short "yes" or "no". These were broad concepts, stunning structures of living thought, complex as cities. The ideas are so vast that they cannot be grasped by earthly thought. But I was not limited by it. There I threw off its limits, like a butterfly throws off its cocoon and gets out into the light of day.

I saw the Earth as a pale blue dot in the endless blackness of physical space. It was given to me to know that good and evil are mixed on Earth and that this is one of its unique properties. There is more good on Earth than evil, but evil is given great power, which is absolutely unacceptable at the highest level of existence. The fact that evil will sometimes prevail was known to the Creator and allowed by Him as a necessary consequence of endowing man with free will.

Tiny particles of evil are scattered throughout the universe, but the total amount of evil is like one grain of sand on a vast sandy shore compared to the good, abundance, hope and unconditional love that literally bathes the universe. The very essence of the alternative dimension is love and benevolence, and everything that does not contain these qualities immediately catches the eye and seems out of place.

But free will comes at the cost of losing or falling out of this all-encompassing love and benevolence. Yes, we are free people, but surrounded by an environment that makes us feel not free. The presence of free will is incredibly important to our role in earthly reality - a role from which - one day we will all know this - will greatly affect whether we will be allowed to ascend into an alternate timeless dimension.

Our life on Earth may seem insignificant because it is too short in comparison with eternal life and other worlds with which the visible and invisible universes are full. However, it is also incredibly important, since it is here that a person is destined to grow, to ascend to God, and this growth is closely watched by beings from the upper world - souls and luminous balls (those beings whom I saw high above me in the Gateway and who, I think, are the source of our concept of angels).

In fact, we make a choice between good and evil as spiritual beings temporarily inhabiting our evolutionary evolved mortal bodies, derivatives of the Earth and earthly circumstances. Real thinking is not born in the brain. But we are so accustomed - partly by the brain itself - to associate it with our thoughts and awareness of our "I" that we have lost the understanding of the fact that we are more than just a physical body, including the brain, and must fulfill our destiny.

Real thinking originated long before the physical world appeared. It is this ancient, subconscious mind that is responsible for all the decisions we make. Real thinking is not subject to logical constructions, but swiftly and purposefully operates with an innumerable amount of information at all levels and instantly gives out the only correct solution. Compared to the spiritual mind, our ordinary thinking is hopelessly timid and clumsy. It is this ancient mindset of catching the ball in the goal area that manifests itself in scientific insights or in composing an inspirational anthem. Subconscious thinking always manifests itself at the most necessary moment, but we often lose access to it, faith in it.

In order to cognize thinking without the participation of the brain, it is necessary to be in the world of instant, spontaneous connections, in comparison with which ordinary thinking is hopelessly inhibited and cumbersome. Our deepest and true self is completely free. It is not tainted or compromised by past actions, it is not concerned with its identity and status. It understands that there is no need to be afraid of the earthly world, and therefore there is no need to exalt oneself with fame, wealth or victory. This “I” is truly spiritual, and one day we are all destined to resurrect it in ourselves. But I am convinced that until that day comes, we must do everything in our power to restore connection with this miraculous essence - to educate and reveal it. This essence is the soul that dwells in our physical body, and it is what God wants us to be.

But how can you develop your spirituality? Only through love and compassion. Why? Because love and compassion are not abstract concepts as they are often thought to be. They are real and tangible. It is they who constitute the very essence, the basis of the spiritual world. To return to it, we must once again ascend to it - even now, while we are attached to earthly life and hardly make our earthly path.

Thinking about God or Allah, Vishnu, Jehovah or whatever you like to call the Source of absolute power, the Creator who rules the Universe, people make one of the greatest mistakes - they imagine Om impassive. Yes, God is behind the numbers, behind the perfection of the Universe, which science measures and seeks to comprehend. But - one more paradox - Om is human, much more human than you and me. Om understands and deeply sympathizes with our position, because he knows what we have forgotten and understands how scary and difficult it is to live, even for a moment forgetting about God.

My consciousness became wider and wider, as if it perceived the entire Universe. Have you ever listened to music on the radio accompanied by atmospheric noises and crackles? You are accustomed to this, believing that it could not be otherwise. But then someone tuned the receiver to the desired wavelength, and the same piece suddenly acquired an amazingly distinct and full sound. It amazes you how you have not noticed interference before.

This is the adaptability of the human body. I have explained to patients more than once that the feeling of discomfort will weaken when their brain and the whole body get used to the new situation. If something happens for long enough, then the brain gets used to ignoring it or just accepting it as normal.

But our limited earthly consciousness is far from normal, and I received the first confirmation of this when I penetrated into the very heart of the Center. My lack of memory of my earthly past did not make me an insignificant insignificance. I realized and remembered who I was there. I was a citizen of the Universe, overwhelmed by its infinity and complexity, and guided only by love.

Ultimately, no person is an orphan. We are all in the same position as I was. That is, each of us has a different family, creatures that follow us and take care of us, creatures that we have forgotten for a while, but which, if we open up to them, are always ready to guide us in our life on Earth. There is no person who is unloved. Each of us is deeply known and loved by the Creator, who tirelessly cares about us. This knowledge should not remain a secret any longer.

Every time I again found myself in the gloomy Land of the Worm, I managed to remember the beautiful Flowing Melody that opened access to the Gates and the Focus. I spent a lot of time - which strangely felt like his absence - in the company of my guardian angel on the wing of a butterfly and absorbed the knowledge emanating from the Creator and the Ball of Light deep in the Center for ages.

At some point, approaching the Gate, I found that I could not enter it. The flowing Melody - which was my pass to the higher worlds - no longer led me there. The gates of Paradise were closed.

How can I describe how I felt? Think back to times when you felt frustrated. So, all our earthly disappointments are in fact variations of the only important loss - the loss of Paradise. On the day when the Gates of Paradise closed in front of me, I experienced incomparable, inexpressible bitterness and sadness. Although there, in the upper world, all human emotions are present, they are incredibly deeper and stronger, more comprehensive - they are, so to speak, not only within you, but also outside. Imagine that every time your mood changes here on Earth, the weather changes along with it. That your tears cause a powerful downpour, and the clouds instantly disappear from your joy. This will give you a glimpse of just how massively and effectively the mood change is taking place there. As for our concepts of "inside" and "outside", they are simply inapplicable there, because there is no such division.

In a word, I plunged into endless grief, which was accompanied by a decline. I descended through enormous stratus clouds. There were whispers all around, but I couldn't make out the words. Then I realized that I was surrounded by kneeling creatures that form arches stretching into the distance one after another. Remembering this now, I understand what these barely visible and perceptible hosts of angels were doing, stretching up and down in a chain in the darkness.

They prayed for me.

Two of them had faces that I remembered later. These were the faces of Michael Sullivan and his wife Paige. I saw them only in profile, but when I was able to speak again, I immediately named them. Michael was present in my room, incessantly reading prayers, but Paige did not appear there (although she also prayed for me).

These prayers gave me strength. Perhaps that is why, as bitter as I was, I felt a strange certainty that everything would be okay. These disembodied beings knew that I was going through a displacement and sang and prayed to support me. I was carried into the unknown, but by that moment I already knew that I would no longer be left alone. This was promised to me by my beautiful companion on the wing of a butterfly and an infinitely loving God. I firmly knew that wherever I went from now on, Paradise would be with me in the form of the Creator, Om, and in the form of my angel - the Girl on the Wing of the Butterfly.

I went back, but I was not alone - and I knew that I would never feel alone again.

When I plunged into the Land of the Worm, then, as always, from the muddy mud appeared, not animal muzzles, but the faces of people. And these people were clearly saying something. True, I could not make out the words.

When I was descending, I could not name any of them. I just knew, rather, I felt that for some reason they were very important to me.

I was especially attracted to one of these faces. It began to attract me. Suddenly, by some impulse, it seemed to be reflected in the whole round dance of clouds and praying angels, past which I descended, I realized that the angels of the Gate and the Center - whom I, apparently, forever loved - were not the only creatures I knew. I knew and loved the creatures below me - in the world to which I was rapidly approaching. Creatures that until that moment I did not remember at all.

This awareness focused on six faces, especially one of them. It was very close and familiar. With surprise and almost fear, I realized that this face belonged to a person who really needed me. That this man would never get well if I left. If I leave him, he will suffer unbearably from the loss, as I suffered when the Gates of Paradise closed in front of me. It would be a betrayal that I could not commit.

Until that moment, I was free. I traveled through the worlds calmly and carelessly, not caring at all about these people. But I was not ashamed of that. Even when I was in the Center, I did not feel any anxiety or guilt for leaving them below. The first thing that I learned when I flew with the Girl on the Butterfly's Wing was the thought: "You cannot do anything wrong."

But now it was different. So differently that for the first time during the whole trip I experienced real horror - not for myself, but for these six, especially for this person. I could not say who he was, but I knew that he was very important to me.

His face became more and more distinct, and, finally, I saw that it - that is, he - was praying that I would return, not be afraid to make a dangerous descent into the lower world in order to be with him again. I still couldn’t make out his words, but somehow I realized that I had a pledge in this lower world.

This meant that I was back. I had connections here that I had to respect. The clearer the face that attracted me became, the more clearly I realized my duty. As I got closer, I recognized this face.

The face of a little boy.

All my relatives, doctors and nurses came running to me. They looked at me with all their eyes, literally speechless, and I calmly and happily smiled at them.

Things are good! - I said, all beaming with joy. I peered into their faces, realizing the divine miracle of our existence. “Don't worry, everything is fine,” I repeated, calming them down.

For two days I raved about skydiving, airplanes and the Internet, reaching out to those who listened to me. While my brain was recovering, I plunged into a strange and excruciatingly abnormal universe. As soon as I closed my eyes, I began to be assailed by the terrible "messages of the Internet" appearing from nowhere; sometimes, when my eyes were open, they appeared on the ceiling. Closing my eyes, I heard a monotonous grinding, strangely reminiscent of chants, which usually disappeared immediately as soon as I opened them again. I kept poking my finger into space, as if pressing keys, trying to work on a computer floating by me with a Russian and Chinese keyboard.

In short, I was like a madman.

Everything was a little like the Land of the Worm, only more terrible, since fragments of my earthly past burst into everything that I saw and heard. (I recognized my family members even if I couldn't remember their names.)

But at the same time, my visions lacked an amazing clarity and vibrant vitality - a reality in the highest sense - the Gate and the Center.

I was definitely going back to my brain.

Despite the first moment of visible full consciousness, when I first opened my eyes, I soon again lost the memory of my human life to a coma. I remembered only the places I had just visited: the gloomy and disgusting Land of the Worm, the idyllic Gates and the heavenly blissful Concentration. My mind - my real “I” - narrowed again, returning to a too close physical form of existence with its space-time boundaries, straightforward thinking and poor verbal communication. Just a week ago I thought it was the only possible kind of existence, but now it seemed to me incredibly squalid and unfree.

Gradually, the hallucinations went away and my thinking became more reasonable, and my speech became clearer. Two days later, I was transferred to the neurological department.

As the temporarily blocked brain became more and more involved in the work, I watched with amazement what I said and did, and wondered: how does it work?

A few more days later, I was already talking briskly with the people who came to visit me. And it did not require much effort on my part. Like an airplane piloted by autopilot, my brain guided me along the increasingly familiar route of my earthly life. This is how I became convinced from my own experience of what I knew as a neurosurgeon: the brain is truly an amazing mechanism.

Day after day, more and more of my “I” returned to me, as well as speech, memory, recognition, a tendency to mischief, which was previously characteristic of me.

Even then, I understood one indisputable fact, which the others soon had to realize. Regardless of what the specialists or the ignorant of neurology thought, I was no longer sick, my brain was not damaged. I was completely healthy. Moreover - although at that moment only I knew it - for the first time in my whole life I was truly healthy.

Little by little, my professional memory returned to me.

One morning I woke up and found myself again possessing all the scientific and medical knowledge that I had not felt the day before. This was one of the strangest aspects of my experience: opening my eyes, feeling that all the results of my training and practice returned to me.

While the neurosurgeon's knowledge returned to me, the memory of what happened to me during my time out of the body also remained completely clear and vivid. Events that took place outside of earthly reality caused in me a feeling of incredible happiness, with which I woke up. And this blissful state did not leave me. Of course, I was very happy to be with my loved ones again. But to this joy was added - I will try to explain it as clearly as possible - an understanding of who I am and what kind of world we live in.

I was overcome with a stubborn - and naive - desire to tell about this, especially to my fellow doctors. After all, what I experienced completely changed my understanding of the brain, consciousness, even understanding of the meaning of life. It would seem, who would refuse to hear about such discoveries?

As it turned out, very many, especially people with medical education.

Don't get me wrong - the doctors were very happy for me.

This is wonderful, Eben, ”they said, as I used to reply to my patients who tried to tell me about otherworldly experiences they had, for example, during an operation. “You were very seriously ill. Your brain was full of pus. We still cannot believe that you are with us and are talking about this. You yourself know what state the brain is in when it comes this far.

But how can I blame them? After all, I would not have understood this - before.

The more the ability to think scientifically returned to me, the clearer I saw how radically my previous scientific and practical knowledge diverged from what I learned, the more I realized that mind and soul continue to exist even after the death of the physical body. I had to tell my story to the world.

The next few weeks passed the same way. I woke up at about two or two and a half in the night and felt such joy from one consciousness that I was alive that I immediately got up. Having lit the fireplace in my study, I sat down in my favorite leather chair and wrote. I remembered all the details of the journey to and from the Center and all the lessons learned that could change my life. Although the word "remembered" is not entirely correct. These pictures were present in me, vivid and distinct.

The day came when I finally wrote down everything I could, the smallest details about the Land of the Worm, the Gates and the Center.

Very quickly I realized that in our time, and in distant centuries, what I experienced was experienced by countless people. Tales of a black tunnel or a gloomy valley, replaced by a bright and lively landscape - absolutely real - existed even in the days of Ancient Greece and Egypt. Tales of angelic beings - sometimes with wings, sometimes without wings - originated at least from the ancient Middle East, as did the notion that these creatures were guardians who watched over the life of people on Earth and met the souls of these people when they left her. Ability to simultaneously see in all directions; the feeling that you are outside linear time - outside of everything that previously considered determining human life; the ability to hear music reminiscent of sacred hymns, which were perceived by the whole being, and not just by the ears; direct transfer and instant assimilation of knowledge, which would take a lot of time and effort to understand on Earth; a sense of all-encompassing and unconditional love ...

Over and over again, in modern confessions and in the spiritual writings of the early centuries, I felt the narrator literally struggling with the limitations of earthly language, wanting to convey his experience as fully as possible, and I saw that he was unable to do so.

And, getting acquainted with these unsuccessful attempts to choose words and our earthly images in order to give an idea of the immense depth and inexpressible splendor of the Universe, I exclaimed in my soul: “Yes, yes! I understand what you wanted to say! "

All these books and materials that existed before my experience, I have never seen before. I emphasize, not only did I not read it, but I didn’t see it in my eyes either. After all, earlier I did not even think about the possibility of the existence of some part of our “I” after the physical death of the body. I was a typical doctor, attentive to my patients, although I was skeptical about their "stories". And I can say that most skeptics are not really skeptics at all. Because, before denying any phenomenon or refuting any point of view, it is necessary to seriously study them. I, like other doctors, did not consider it necessary to spend time studying the experience of clinical death. I just knew that it was impossible, that it could not be.

From a medical point of view, my complete recovery seemed completely impossible and was a real miracle. But the main thing is where I have been ...

I vividly remembered being out of the body, and when I found myself in a church, where I was not particularly attracted before, I saw pictures and heard music, which caused the sensations I had already experienced. Low rhythmic chants shook the gloomy Land of the Worm. Mosaic windows with angels in the clouds resembled the heavenly beauty of the Gate. The image of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked a bright feeling of communion with the Center. I shuddered, remembering the bliss of endless unconditional love, which I knew in the upper world.

Finally, I understood what true faith is. Or at least as it should be. I didn't just believe in God; I knew Ohm. And I slowly walked to the altar to receive communion, and could not hold back my tears.

It took about two months for all my scientific and practical knowledge to finally return to me. Of course, the very fact of their return is a real miracle. Until now, in medical practice, there is no analogue to my case: so that the brain, which has been under the powerful destructive action of the gram-negative bacteria E. coli for a long period, completely restored all its functions. So, relying on the newly acquired knowledge, I tried to comprehend the deep contradiction between everything that I learned during forty years of study and practice about the human brain, about the Universe and the formation of an idea of reality, and what I experienced in seven days of a coma. Before my sudden illness, I was an ordinary doctor who worked in the most prestigious scientific institutes in the world and tried to understand the relationship between the brain and consciousness. It's not that I don't believe in consciousness. It's just that I understood more than anyone else the unlikely likelihood that it exists independently of the brain and everything in general!

In the 1920s, physicist Werner Heisenberg and other founders of quantum mechanics, studying the atom, made such an unusual discovery that the world is still trying to make sense of it. Namely: during a scientific experiment, an alternating action occurs between the observer and the observed object, that is, a connection, and it is impossible to separate the observer (that is, the scientist) from what he sees. In everyday life, we do not take this factor into account. For us, the Universe is filled with countless isolated, separate objects (for example, tables and chairs, people and planets), which in one way or another interact with each other, but at the same time remain essentially separate. However, when viewed from the point of view of quantum theory, this universe of separately existing objects turns out to be a complete illusion. In the world of microscopic particles, every object in the physical universe is ultimately related to all other objects. In fact, there are no objects in the world - only energetic vibrations and interactions.

The meaning of this is obvious, although not for everyone. Without the involvement of consciousness, it was impossible to study the very essence of the Universe. Consciousness is not at all a secondary product of physical processes (as I thought before my experience) and not just really exists - it is even more real than all other physical objects, but - quite possibly - is their basis. However, these views have not yet formed the basis for scientists' ideas about reality. Many of them are trying to do this, but a unified physical and mathematical "theory of everything" has not yet been built, which would combine the laws of quantum mechanics with the laws of the theory of relativity in such a way that it would include consciousness.

All objects in the physical universe are composed of atoms. Atoms are made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons. Those, in turn (as established by physicists at the beginning of the 20th century), consist of microparticles. And microparticles are made of ... To tell the truth, while physicists do not know exactly what they are made of.

But they know for sure that in the Universe, each particle is connected with another. They are all interconnected at the deepest level.

Before the ACS, I had the most general idea of these scientific ideas. My life flowed in the atmosphere of a modern city with a dense car traffic and populous residential areas, in the strenuous work at the operating table and anxiety for patients. So, even if these facts of atomic physics were reliable, they did not affect my daily life in any way.

But when I escaped from my physical body, the deepest interconnection between everything in the Universe was fully revealed to me. I even consider myself entitled to say that, being in the Gates and in the Center, I "created science", although at that time I, of course, did not think about it. Science, which is based on the most accurate and complex tool of scientific knowledge that we have, namely, consciousness as such.

The more I reflected on my experience, the more I became convinced that my discovery was not just interesting and exciting. It was scientific. The perception of my interlocutors regarding consciousness was of two types: some considered it the greatest mystery for science, others did not see the problem here at all. It's amazing how many scientists take this latter point of view. They believe that consciousness is just a product of biological processes taking place in the brain. Someone goes even further, arguing that it is not only secondary, but that it simply does not exist. However, many leading scientists in the philosophy of mind would disagree with them. Over the past decades, they have had to admit the existence of a "difficult problem of consciousness." David Chalmers was the first to express his idea of the "difficult problem of consciousness" in the brilliant 1996 work The Conscious Mind. The "hard problem of consciousness" touches on the very existence of mental experience and can be summed up in the following questions:

How are consciousness and a functioning brain connected?

How does consciousness relate to behavior?

How does sensory experience relate to reality?

These questions are so complex that, according to some thinkers, modern science is unable to answer them. However, this does not make the problem of consciousness less important - to understand the nature of consciousness means to understand the meaning of its incredibly serious role in the Universe.

Over the past four hundred years, the main role in the knowledge of the world was assigned to science, which studied exclusively the physical side of things and phenomena. And this led to the fact that we lost interest and approaches to the deepest riddle of the basis of existence - to our consciousness. Many scientists argue that ancient religions perfectly understood the nature of consciousness and carefully guarded this knowledge from the uninitiated. But our secular culture, in its admiration for the power of modern science and technology, has neglected the precious experience of the past.

For the progress of Western civilization, humanity has paid a huge price in the form of the loss of the very foundation of existence - our spirit. The greatest scientific discoveries and high technologies have led to catastrophic consequences, which are modern military strategies, senseless killing of people and suicides, sick cities, environmental harm, dramatic climate change, and misuse of economic resources. All this is terrible. But even worse is the fact that the exceptional importance that we attach to the rapid development of science and technology deprives us of the meaning and joy of life, deprives us of the opportunity to understand our role in the great design of the entire universe.

It is difficult to answer questions about the soul, the afterlife, reincarnation, God and Paradise using generally accepted scientific terms. After all, science believes that all this simply does not exist. In the same way, such phenomena of consciousness as vision at a distance, extrasensory perception, telekinesis, clairvoyance, telepathy and foresight stubbornly defy the solution with the help of "standard" scientific methods. Until coma, I myself doubted the reliability of these phenomena, since I had never experienced them personally, and my simplified scientific worldview could not explain them.

Like other skeptical scientists, I refused to even consider information about these phenomena - because of a persistent bias against the information itself and those from whom it came. My limited views did not allow me to catch even the faintest hint of how these things might have happened. Despite the huge amount of evidence for the phenomenon of expanded consciousness, skeptics deny its evidence-based nature and deliberately ignore it. They are confident that they have true knowledge, so there is no need for them to consider such facts.

We are seduced by the idea that scientific knowledge of the world is rapidly approaching the creation of a unified physical and mathematical theory that explains all known fundamental interactions, in which there is no place for our soul, spirit, Paradise and God. My coma journey from the earthly physical world to the higher realms of the Almighty Creator has exposed an incredibly deep chasm between human knowledge and the awe-inspiring kingdom of God.

Consciousness is so familiar and inherently connected with our existence that it still remains incomprehensible to the human mind. In the physics of the material world (in quarks, electrons, photons, atoms, etc.) and especially in the complex structure of the brain, there is nothing that would give us even the slightest hint of the nature of consciousness.

The most important key to understanding the reality of the spirit world is solving deepest secrets our consciousness. This mystery still defies the efforts of physicists and neuroscientists, and therefore the deep relationship between consciousness and quantum mechanics, that is, the entire physical world, remains unknown.

To know the Universe, it is necessary to recognize the fundamental role of consciousness in the idea of reality. Experiments in quantum mechanics amazed the brilliant founders of this field of physics, many of whom (suffice it to mention Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Sir James Jeans), in search of an answer, turned to a mystical view of the world.

As for me, beyond the limits of the physical world, the indescribable vastness and complexity of the Universe, as well as the indisputable fact that consciousness lies at the basis of all that exist, were revealed to me. I was so merged with him that I often did not feel the difference between my “I” and the world in which I was moving. If I had to briefly describe my discoveries, then, firstly, I would note that the Universe is immeasurably larger than it seems when we look at directly visible objects. This is certainly not news, as mainstream science recognizes that 96 percent of the universe is "dark matter and energy."

What are these dark structures? So far, no one knows for sure. My experience is unique in that I instantly assimilated the unspoken knowledge about the leading role of consciousness, or spirit. And this knowledge was not theoretical, but factual, exciting and tangible, like a breath of cold wind on your face. Secondly, we are all extremely complex and inextricably linked with the vast Universe. She is our real home. And giving primary importance to the physical world is like closing in a cramped closet and imagining that there is nothing behind its doors. And thirdly, faith plays a key role in understanding the primacy of consciousness and the secondary nature of matter. As a medical student, I was often amazed at the power of placebos. We were told that about 30 percent of the benefits of medication should be attributed to the patient's belief that they will help him, even if they are completely inert drugs. Instead of seeing the hidden power of faith in this and understanding its effect on our health, doctors saw the glass as "half empty," that is, they considered the placebo a hindrance in determining the benefits of the investigational medicine.

At the heart of the mystery of quantum mechanics lies a misconception about our place in space and time. The rest of the universe, that is, the largest part of it, is not really remote from us in space. Yes, physical space seems real, but at the same time it has its limits. The dimensions of the physical Universe are nothing compared to the spiritual world that gave birth to it - the world of consciousness (which can be called the power of love).

This other universe, immensely exceeding the physical, is not at all separated from us by distant spaces, as it seems to us. In fact, we are all in it - I am in my city, typing these lines, and you are at home, reading them. It is not distant from us in the physical sense, but simply exists at a different frequency. We are not aware of this, because most of us do not have access to the frequency at which it reveals itself. We exist on the scales of the usual time and space, the limits of which are determined by the imperfection of our sensory perception of reality, which other scales are inaccessible to.

The ancient Greeks understood this a long time ago, and I just discovered what they already defined: "Explain like like like." The universe is arranged in such a way that for a true understanding of any of its dimensions and levels, it is necessary to become part of this dimension. Or, to put it more precisely, you need to realize your identity of that part of the Universe to which you already belong, which you do not even suspect.

The universe has no beginning or end, and God (Om) is present in every particle of it. Most discussions about God and the higher spiritual world bring them down to our level, and not raise our consciousness to their height.

Our imperfect interpretation distorts their true selves, worthy of awe.

But although the existence of the universe is eternal and infinite, it has punctuation points designed to bring people to life and enable them to participate in the glory of God. The Big Bang, which marked the beginning of our universe, was one such "punctuation mark".

Om looked at it from the outside, embracing everything He created, inaccessible even to my large-scale vision in the higher worlds. To see there was to know. There was no difference between the sensory perception of objects and phenomena and the understanding of their essence.

“I was blind, but now I have received my sight” - this phrase acquired a new meaning for me when I realized how blind we, earthlings, are to the creative nature of the spiritual universe. Especially those of us (I used to belong to them) who are sure that the main thing is matter, all the rest - thoughts, consciousness, ideas, emotions, spirit - is only its derivative.

This revelation literally inspired me, it gave me the opportunity to see the boundless heights of spiritual unity and what awaits all of us when we go beyond our physical body.

Humor. Irony, Paphos. I have always thought that people have developed these qualities in themselves in order to survive in the often difficult and unfair world of the earth. This is partly true. But at the same time they give us an understanding of the truth that no matter how hard it is for us in this world, suffering will not affect us as spiritual beings. Laughter and irony remind us that we are not prisoners of this world, but only pass through it, like through a dense and full of danger forest.

Another aspect of the good news is that in order to look beyond the mysterious veil, a person does not have to be on the line between life and death. You just need to read books and attend lectures on spiritual life, and at the end of the day, with the help of prayer or meditation, immerse yourself in our subconscious in order to gain access to higher truths.

Just as my consciousness was individual and at the same time inseparable from the Universe, in the same way it either narrowed or expanded, embracing everything in the Universe. The boundaries between my consciousness and the surrounding reality sometimes became so vague and vague that I myself became the universe. Otherwise, it can be expressed as follows: at times I felt my complete identity with the Universe, which was integral to me, but which I did not understand until then.

To explain the state of consciousness at this deep level, I often resort to the comparison with a hen's egg. During my stay in the Concentration, when I found myself alone with the Luminous ball and the entire incredibly grandiose Universe and in the end remained alone with God, I clearly felt that He, as a creative primordial aspect, is comparable to the shell around the contents of an egg, which are intimately connected ( as our consciousness is a direct continuation of God), and yet infinitely higher than absolute identification with the consciousness of his creation. Even when my “I” merged with everything and with eternity, I felt that I could not become completely merged with the creative principle of the creator of all that exists. Behind the deepest and most profound unity, duality was still felt. Perhaps such a tangible duality is a consequence of the desire to return the expanded consciousness to the boundaries of our earthly reality.

I didn’t hear Ohm’s voice, I didn’t see his appearance. It seemed that Om was talking to me through thoughts, which, like waves, rolled through me, caused vibrations in the world around me and proved that there is a more subtle fabric of existence - a fabric of which we are all a part, but which we are usually not aware of.

So did I communicate directly with God? Undoubtedly. Sounds pretentious, but then it didn't feel like that to me. I felt that the soul of any human being that has left its body is capable of communicating with God, and that we can all live righteously if we pray or resort to meditation. It is impossible to imagine anything more sublime and sacred than communion with God, and at the same time it is the most natural act, for God is always with us. Omniscient, omnipotent and loving us without any conditions or reservations. We are all bound together by a sacred bond with God.

I understand that there will be people who will try in any way to devalue my experience; some will simply dismiss it, refusing to see scientific value in it, considering it just feverish delirium and fantasy.

But I know better. For the sake of those who live on Earth, and for the sake of those with whom I met outside this world, I consider it my duty - the duty of a scientist seeking to get to the bottom of the truth, and the duty of a doctor called to help people - to say that what I experienced was genuine and the present, that it is filled with great significance. This is important not only for me, but for all of humanity.

I, as before, a scientist and a doctor, and therefore must honor the truth and heal people. And that means telling your story. As time goes by, I am more and more convinced that this story happened to me for a reason. My case demonstrates the futility of the attempts of reduction science to prove that only this material world exists and that consciousness or soul - whether mine or yours - is not the greatest and most important mystery of the Universe.

I am a living refutation of that.

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