Did anyone die? Do the dead see us after death: the connection between the soul and a living person. Is there a connection with the dead?

Don't be afraid and try to explore all the paranormal around you. Sometimes, when people move into a new home, they are left with the feeling that they are constantly being watched. 4. Feelings of heaviness in the air. Some people are sensitive to change energy field, caused by the presence of a ghost or spirit in the house, and this sensation is akin to the feeling of heaviness in the air, making it difficult for a person to breathe. A sudden change in air can be caused by the appearance of a ghost or spirit in the house and is another sign that you are not alone in the house. People who are not hypersensitive to such phenomena may also notice this, because sudden changes can make it difficult for a person to breathe. Usually, after cleansing a house or apartment, or exorcism in more dangerous cases, people notice that the air becomes cleaner and lighter almost immediately after the completion of the ritual. 5.

How to find out if someone died in an apartment

To prevent this from happening, follow the advice of professionals. Why is a cleanliness test necessary? Failure to thoroughly check the apartment and its documents before purchasing can result in a number of problems. Here are just the most common of them:

  • Declaration of heirs entitled to ownership.
  • The appearance of registered or discharged persons who have every right to live in the housing you purchased.
  • The presence of a rent payer who has the right to the apartment after the death of the seller.
  • Cancellation of a transaction due to the insanity of the seller or the conclusion of a transaction with a person who does not have the right to conclude it.

House

Moreover, if the person who is indicated in the will as an heir does not know about its existence and misses the six-month period, then all bequeathed property (apartment, house, dacha, car) will go to the closest relatives of the deceased. They will enter into rights as heirs by law. To prevent this from happening, you need to take several steps to search for inheritance documents. Important. The will is drawn up in two copies. The first of them is issued to the testator, and the second remains in storage in the notary's office.


Attention

To register an inheritance, it is enough to find any of them. Step 1. We are looking for a testator in the apartment. First, you need to carefully examine the things in the apartment of the deceased relative. You need to look especially carefully in places where important documents were usually kept.


The will may well be found there.

Checking the apartment before purchasing

This category of people includes prisoners being treated in dispensaries, serving in the army, and missing persons. You can find out everything about the citizens registered in the apartment by requesting an extended extract from the house register.

  • It is important to check whether there are other heirs who can claim the housing according to the inheritance law. It is possible that someone’s rights were not taken into account when entering into an inheritance. If the deal takes place without them, they can easily challenge it in court.

    To check, you should contact the notary who registered the fact of inheritance and ask for an extract from the notary book. If the heirs do show up, their written refusal is required.

Checking the power of attorney When concluding a transaction with a trusted person, it is necessary to check the power of attorney issued to him - whether it has been revoked or expired. To do this, just contact the notary who issued the document.

Would you buy an apartment after the deceased?

  • Find out if the residents of the apartment have any serious illnesses, for example, tuberculosis.
  • Check the general condition - chips and cracks in the walls and ceiling, if the floor is the last - the presence of roof leaks.
  • Also find out in advance what your neighbors are like. Who knows, maybe in the apartment above there lives an alcoholic or drug addict who constantly floods you and throws parties in the evenings.
  • Video: What to look for when buying an apartment on the secondary market? You will learn more about what you should pay attention to when buying an apartment on the secondary market, and how to act in a given situation, from a consultation with a specialist: When buying an apartment, it is important to check not only its condition, but also its legal purity, the identity of the seller, the authenticity papers and the presence of other applicants for housing.

Entrance

This is a guarantee of money back in the event that the contract is terminated. Checking the registration certificate The first thing worth checking is that the seller has a document confirming the fact of state registration of the property. It contains the following information:

  1. How many times was it issued to the owner, and what were the reasons for re-issuance?
  2. How the property was acquired - according to a will or as a result of a gift agreement, exchange or privatization.
    Please pay Special attention, if the apartment was received as a gift or inheritance not from a relative, but from a third party, and quite recently. In such a situation, deception can be expected.
  3. Find out the number of property owners. It is worth remembering that each of them takes part in the transaction.

How and where to find out about the presence of a will?

Important

An extract from the Unified State Register for real estate and transactions with it is as follows: More information about the extract from the Unified State Register can be found here: http://consultbook.ru/grazhdanskoe-pravo/documenti-i-spravki/vypiska-iz-egrp.html. Cadastral passport and technical plan It is also necessary to require the presentation of a cadastral passport, as well as a technical plan of the apartment, to ensure two things:

  • They sell you an apartment that corresponds to the data specified in the certificate of ownership - address, square footage.
  • No illegal redevelopment was carried out in the apartment. If the housing was previously redesigned without approval from local authorities, then the buyer will subsequently have to not only pay a fine, but also, possibly, return the apartment to its previous appearance.

The cadastral passport consists of two sheets.


The first one presents basic information, and the second one shows the housing plan.

How can I find out if a deceased person has a will?

For example, in case of delay in payment of the amount specified in the contract by a certain date, the contract is assumed to be terminated.

  • Date of entry into force of the agreement. If the date is recent, there may be a catch.

After passing away loved one our consciousness does not want to put up with the fact that he is no longer around. I would like to believe that somewhere far away in heaven he remembers us and can send a message.

In this article

The connection between the soul and a living person

Followers of religious and esoteric teachings considered as a small particle of Divine consciousness. On Earth, the soul manifests itself through the best qualities of a person: kindness, honesty, nobility, generosity, the ability to forgive. Creative abilities are considered a gift from God, which means they are also realized through the soul.

She is immortal, but the human body has a limited lifespan. Therefore, the soul leaves the body and goes to another level of the universe.

Basic theories about afterlife

Myths and religious views of peoples offer their vision of what happens to a person after death. For example, " Tibetan book of the Dead" describes step by step all the stages through which the soul passes from the moment of dying to the next incarnation on Earth.

Heaven and Hell, Heavenly Court

In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, a Heavenly court in which one's earthly deeds are judged. Depending on the number of mistakes and good deeds, God, angels or apostles divide dead people into sinners and righteous people in order to send them either to Heaven for eternal bliss or to hell for eternal torment.

However, the ancient Greeks had something similar, where all the dead were sent to the underground kingdom of Hades under the guardianship of Cerberus. Souls were also distributed according to their level of righteousness. Pious people were placed in Elysium, and vicious people were placed in Tartarus.

The judgment of souls is present in different variations in ancient myths. In particular, the Egyptians had a deity, Anubis, who weighed the heart of the deceased with an ostrich feather to measure the severity of his sins. Pure souls headed to the paradise fields of the solar god Ra, where the rest were not allowed to go.

The souls of the righteous go to heaven

Evolution of the soul, Karma, Reincarnation

Religions ancient india look at the fate of the soul differently. According to traditions, she comes to Earth more than once and each time she gains invaluable experience necessary for spiritual evolution.

The souls of loved ones who passed away earlier appear nearby. They look like living substances emitting light, but the traveler knows exactly who he has met. These entities help to move to next stage, where the Angel awaits - a guide to the higher spheres.

The path the soul follows is illuminated by Light

People find it difficult to describe the image of the Divine being on the path of the soul in words. This is the embodiment of Love and a sincere desire to help. According to one version, this is a Guardian Angel. According to another, the progenitor of all human souls. The guide communicates with the newcomer using telepathy, without words, in the ancient language of images. He demonstrates the events and misdeeds of his past life, but without the slightest hint of condemnation.

The road passes through space filled with Light. Survivors of clinical death talk about the feeling of an invisible barrier, which probably serves as a boundary between the world of the living and kingdom of the dead. None of those who returned comprehended beyond the veil. What lies beyond the line is not given to the living to know.

Can the soul of the deceased come to visit?

The religion condemns the practice of spiritualism. This is considered a sin, since a tempting demon may appear under the guise of a deceased relative. Serious esotericists also do not approve of such sessions, since at this moment a portal opens through which dark entities can penetrate into our world.

The Church condemns seances for communicating with the dead

However, such visits can occur on the initiative of those who left Earth. If there was a strong connection between people in earthly life, then death will not break it. For at least 40 days, the soul of the deceased can visit relatives and friends and observe them from the side. People with high sensitivity sense this presence.

Russian biologist Vasily Lepeshkin

In the 1930s, a Russian biochemist discovered energy emissions emanating from a dying body. The bursts were recorded on ultra-sensitive photographic film. Based on observations, the scientist came to the conclusion that a special substance is separated from the dying body, which in religions is usually called the soul.

Professor Konstantin Korotkov

Doctor of Technical Sciences has developed a method of gas discharge visualization (GDV), which makes it possible to record fine-material radiation from the human body and obtain an image of the aura in real time.

Using the GDV method, the professor recorded energy processes at the moment of death. In fact, Korotkov’s experiments gave a picture of how a subtle component emerges from a dying person. The scientist believes that then consciousness, together with the subtle body, goes to another dimension.

Physicists Michael Scott from Edinburgh and Fred Alan Wolf from California

Adherents of the theory of many parallel Universes. Some of their options coincide with reality, others radically differ from it.

Any Living being(more precisely, his spiritual center) never dies. It is simultaneously embodied in different versions of reality, and each individual part is unaware of its counterparts from parallel worlds.

Professor Robert Lantz

He drew an analogy between the continuous existence of humans and the life cycles of plants, which die in the winter, but begin to grow again in the spring. Thus, Lanz’s views are close to the Eastern doctrine of personal reincarnation.

The professor admits the existence of parallel worlds in which the same soul lives at the same time.

Anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff

Due to the specifics of my work, I observed people on the verge of life and death. Now he is sure that the soul has a quantum nature. Stewart believes that it is not formed by neurons, but by the unique substance of the Universe. After the death of the physical body, spiritual information about the personality is transmitted into space and lives there as free consciousness.

Conclusion

As you can see, neither religion nor modern science don't deny . Scientists, by the way, even called it exact weight– 21 grams. Having left this world, the soul continues to live in another dimension.

However, while remaining on Earth, we cannot voluntarily make contact with departed relatives. We can only keep good memories of them and believe that they also remember us.

A little about the author:

Evgeniy Tukubaev The right words and your faith are the key to success in the perfect ritual. I will provide you with information, but its implementation directly depends on you. But don’t worry, a little practice and you will succeed! Copper bracelet for health and protection from dark forces: myth or reality?

Content

When someone close to us dies, the living want to know whether the dead can hear or see us after physical death, whether it is possible to contact them and get answers to questions. There are many real stories, confirming this hypothesis. They talk about intervention other world into our lives. Different religions also do not deny that the souls of the dead are close to loved ones.

What does a person see when he dies?

What a person sees and feels when the physical body dies can only be judged by the stories of those who have experienced clinical death. The stories of many patients whom doctors were able to save have much in common. They all talk about similar sensations:

  1. A man watches other people bending over his body from the side.
  2. At first, a strong anxiety is felt, as if the soul does not want to leave the body and say goodbye to the usual earthly life, but then calm comes.
  3. Pain and fear disappear, the state of consciousness changes.
  4. The person doesn't want to go back.
  5. After passing through a long tunnel, a creature appears in a circle of light and calls for you.

Scientists believe that these impressions do not relate to what the person who has passed on to another world feels. They explain such visions as a hormonal surge, the effects of medications, and brain hypoxia. Although different religions When describing the process of separation of the soul from the body, they talk about the same phenomena - observing what is happening, the appearance of an angel, saying goodbye to loved ones.

Is it true that dead people can see us?

To answer whether deceased relatives and other people see us, we need to study different theories about the afterlife. Christianity talks about two opposite places where the soul can go after death - heaven and hell. Depending on how a person lived, how righteously, he is rewarded with eternal bliss or doomed to endless suffering for his sins.

When discussing whether the dead see us after death, we should turn to the Bible, which says that souls resting in paradise remember their lives, can observe earthly events, but do not experience passions. People who were recognized as saints after death appear to sinners, trying to guide them on the true path. According to esoteric theories, the spirit of the deceased has a close connection with loved ones only when he has unfulfilled tasks.

Does the soul of a deceased person see his loved ones?

After death, the life of the body ends, but the soul continues to live. Before going to heaven, she stays with her loved ones for another 40 days, trying to console them and ease the pain of loss. Therefore, in many religions it is customary to schedule a wake at this time in order to spend the soul in world of the dead. It is believed that ancestors see and hear us even many years after death. Priests advise not to speculate about whether the dead see us after death, but to try to grieve less about the loss, because the suffering of relatives is difficult for the deceased.

Can the soul of the deceased come to visit?

When the connection between loved ones was strong during life, this relationship is difficult to interrupt. Relatives can feel the presence of the deceased and even see his silhouette. This phenomenon is called a phantom or ghost. Another theory says that the spirit comes to visit for communication only in a dream, when our body is asleep and our soul is awake. During this period, you can ask for help from deceased relatives.

Can a deceased person become a guardian angel?

After the loss of a loved one, the pain of loss can be very great. I would like to know if deceased relatives can hear us and tell us about their troubles and sorrows. Religious teaching does not deny that deceased people become guardian angels for their kind. However, in order to receive such an appointment, a person must be a deeply religious believer during his lifetime, not sin and follow God's commandments. Often the guardian angels of a family become children who left early, or people who devoted themselves to worship.

Is there a connection with the dead?

According to people with psychic abilities, the connection between the real and the afterlife exists, and is very strong, so it is possible to perform such an action as talk to the deceased. To contact the deceased from the other world, some psychics conduct spiritualistic séances, where you can communicate with a deceased relative and ask him questions.

“Easy, my dear, easy when the time comes to die. Nothing overwhelming, fancy or special. No rhetoric, no words. A conscious person does not need to wear his favorite mask of Christ, Goethe or little Nellie. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the simple act of dying, the fact of clear light.”

(O. Huxley)

To let go of the last moment and open to the next is to consciously die from moment to moment.

When we accept the death within, life becomes bright and acceptable. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about facing death is the depth to which it absorbs our attention. If you can fully experience even one moment of existence, you will find what you have always been looking for. We are accustomed to not paying attention to many things, but death attracts our gaze.

In a sense, all this talk about death is a ruse. After all, everything that we call death applies only to the body. Death threatens our apparent existence only to the extent that we believe in this threat. She forces us to pay attention. By focusing on death, we become fully alive. After all, wherever our attention is, wherever our awareness is, there we experience life.

In fact, an increase in Lately interest in “dangerous sports” such as mountaineering, skydiving and surfing may well be another ploy to force oneself to be in the present. Many people say that they only “feel fully alive” when they engage in these types of sports. After all, a person must be attentive, and the more attentive he is, the more fully he lives. Perhaps this is why many dying people also say that they have never been so alive before. When we internally accept death, we stop denying, judging, being irritated, and no longer engaging in trading. We don't push away our depression. We ask ourselves the fundamental question: “Who dies?” – and we give up resistance and knowledge because we see that they block our understanding.

Perhaps our first insight into the process of acknowledging, opening, and letting go, which we call “mindful dying,” comes when we see that we are not the body. This understanding is constantly evolving. We see that we have a body, but the body is not us. You can just as easily wear a coat without being a coat. The coat is respected because it is a given of the moment, and also because, given the prospect of a long winter's journey to wisdom and love, it would be unwise to lose or tear it. But when spring comes, a person no longer needs a coat. Then he throws it away or takes it to the dry cleaner.

One guy once said that he realized that “he is a creation that is constantly changing in the process of becoming.” He saw the perfect unfolding of every moment, and yet he did not feel anything that he should do. He realized that all his efforts to become someone or something “only dulled the charm of what is.”

The stages of formation, our constant desire to become someone, dissolve in the stagelessness of pure existence. This is the end of all stages. It's like walking into an empty room with no walls and no doors. When we awaken from sleep, we discover that we never slept (that the dream was also just a part of a dream). This is a way beyond creation and destruction. You are neither the dancer, nor the dance, nor even the platform on which the dance occurs, nor the music, nor even the electrons and the empty space between them, nor the perception of them, nor the awareness that you are not one of them, nor the feelings that arise you have in response to this awareness, not even the state of “I don’t know”, in which all this can be clearly seen. You realize that you cannot know who you are, you can only be yourself.

Our perception of the universe is changing. The question "Who is dying?" also changes when we see that everything old is not what we imagined it to be. Every “thing” seems more real to us than ever before. It's not just something you trip over while going to the bathroom at night. Things are not so connected to you, but still have a vibrant suchness. They do not have a separate reality of “this” or “that”, but a fundamental suchness from which everything is built.

When we let go of old thoughts, feelings, patterns, concepts, old world dissolves, and on the screen of consciousness from moment to moment begins to form new world. This is not the usual old shabby movie that has so far replaced the truth for us. And although at first we suffer because of its loss, the loss of what we knew so well, we soon abandon the false security and suffering that defined our imagined territory of body and mind. New things appear when we discover deeper levels of our “I don’t know.” We no longer strive to become someone or something. We just open up to everything. We no longer become, but simply remain.

The death of the body is accompanied by less agony than the death of the ego, the separate self. The death of the self is the tearing away of everything that seems immutable to us, the destruction of the walls that we have built in order to hide behind them. When we give up the patterns that are constantly present in the suffering mind, dizziness and nausea may occur. It is like emerging from a tiny cave onto a mountain slope from which a picturesque panorama of the Himalayas opens. This means the death of everything we used to think of ourselves as, all the thoughts and projections that attracted us so strongly in the past and promised to make us something in the future. All this must be allowed to die in the flow of passing life.

When we allow everything we imagine ourselves to be to die, everything around us appears empty, impermanent in nature. And we experience the transience of the separate “I” to which we have been attached for so long. When we see the nature of this apparent separateness, we understand that in reality there is no one who dies, and that only the illusion of our separateness is reborn again and again. Then, if loneliness, anxiety or fear arises, we recognize them as aspirations that accompany us from incarnation to incarnation. We see everything as coming and going. We feel as if for the first time we are listening to the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha or Jesus - our true nature.

Physical death begins to be respected because it provides an excellent opportunity to leave the body, to recognize the relativity of everything that we consider substantial. When we leave the body, we see that everything we thought was us (mind and body) is actually not at all what we imagined it to be. This is how we get closer to the truth beyond reason.

“How could it be that you began to trust your thoughts so much when in fact they do not stand still for a single moment?” "Who thinks that?"

The mind-body no longer tries to protect itself at any cost. The stages of formation are created by the inertia of our struggle for pleasure. Perhaps this is the so-called “thirst for life.” But the refusal to become makes it possible to see the fundamental unity of being, to gain deep satisfaction from the fact that there is no one to protect and no one to be. This is how life acquires new lightness and tranquility. We realize that an extension of suffering is also everything that we have invented to distract ourselves from suffering, even our feeble attempts to control or possess the world, which we call “understanding.”

“It is enough to get rid of misunderstandings - understanding will take care of itself.”

The suffering that comes from “trying to understand,” to figure out our relationship to the universe, to figure out “where we are,” is based on the idea that we are separate. Thought can never comprehend reality, because what is thinkable is a small fraction of the real. Then we give up partial understanding in order to directly experience the truth and not try to contain it in our superficial mind.

Maharajji once addressed his follower and said, “Don’t be attached even to the next breath.”

When the mind and heart come together in their loving surrender and clear acceptance of what is, only then is conscious death possible. Observing the process that we have always mistakenly taken for the "I", we see that everything that arises passes away, ends and is replaced by the next moment - that even time itself is constantly dying.

Death is an illusion that we are all caught up in, so we must be careful that “conscious death” does not become even more of an illusion when we imagine that we know what death is.

We hear about the deaths of Zen masters, saints, everyone we consider to be “great people,” and we learn that they die without the slightest resistance. It seems to us that we are not capable of this. But I see that many people are confused as they approach death, but eventually achieve oneness with the dying process. They, presumably, in the last months of their lives go through what can be called “reincarnation.” They deepen the work they may have been born to do. They are no longer someone separate, someone "dying consciously." They become simply space within space, light within light.

Robin was thirty-three when I met her. She has been working with her cancer for the past two and a half years. When she was diagnosed, she was an agent for an insurance company. “I was pretty angular back then,” she said. Trying to understand the healing process, opening up to the rigidity that may well have been the cause of her illness, she began to explore life itself. In the year and a half since her fatal diagnosis, she has deepened her engagement in life through meditation, prayer and reading spiritual texts that had previously made little sense to her.

“What a great teaching this cancer is!” – she exclaimed, starting to tell what happened to her the night before. She said that it seemed to her that she was approaching death. And when she opened her heart in prayer, she felt that she was moving in a great tunnel, which soon ended, and she found herself on a wide golden palm. For the first time in several months she did not feel pain, and now, lying on her palm and enjoying the calm, she thought that she must have been lazy if she still had not looked around. Then she got down on all fours, looked over the edge of her palm and saw what seemed to her an endless starry sky. She said that she saw tens of thousands of twinkling stars and that somehow she knew them all intimately and, in fact, was another such star. She didn't know how this was possible; she only knew that it was so. One of the stars came closer and it was Jesus, then another one came out and it was Ramana Maharshi. Then each of these stars returned to the star field again and became the same as all the others. At that moment, she said, she realized that the nature of all things is one. In a moment, the surroundings melted away and she found herself in her sick body. She said that after this experience she was filled with the feeling that death was “nothing special.”

After a year, she seemed to have reached the “end game” and was about to die. She knew that in the tradition of the Eskimos and North American Indians, the dying person would gather all his relatives and sometimes wait several weeks for them to gather, to say goodbye to each of them and wish them well before returning to a quiet room and dying a peaceful death. She decided that she would also try this kind of conscious dying. She had done many things in the past years and thought that this would be the perfect manifestation of the consciousness that she had worked so hard on during months of suffering and anxiety. She invited her loved ones to come to her home on March 10 to be with her on the evening of her death. When the tenth day approached, she, in her words, had to hold on so as not to die “before the allotted time,” without deeply experiencing a farewell to her loved ones on the eve of death. On the morning of her appointed day ex-husband, my six-year-old son, my sister (a doctor), my brother and his wife and I - we all gathered to say goodbye to the one we loved so much. Evening was approaching. The table was set, but few people ate. The moment was filled with the energy of farewell. Around eight o'clock in the evening, Robin's sister and brother helped Robin move from the bedroom to the living room. It was a very powerful moment. She was very clear, fully accepting of her death and the satisfaction that death gave her - the joy of being with loved ones and leaving her body without regret and without unfinished business. After an hour and a half of communication, she felt weak and was escorted back to her room. Everyone remained sitting in the living room, looking into each other's eyes with sadness and understanding. We each said goodbye to her and wished her all the best on her new journey of consciousness. When the door closed behind Robin, many cried with longing for the one they would never see again.

At five o'clock the next morning, Robin woke up and said, "Oh, shit!" That night, each of us came to her room and said goodbye to her for the last time, since it seemed to us all that she was living out her last hours on earth. In the evening we read the Bible to her, and she listened with peace. It was decided that I would sleep in her room in a sleeping bag so that I could be with her in the last moments before her death.

At four o'clock in the morning we both woke up, looking into each other's eyes, and began to laugh because nature knew how to count time better than us. This went on for many days. In the first few days, the first thing in the morning we returned to level zero, letting go of all prejudices, opening up to the process as it was. By the fourth day, our communication at dawn lasted only about half an hour. We have switched to communicating through silence rather than through words. Our job in the evening, about an hour before going to bed, was to open ourselves to the image of Jesus that appeared more and more clearly in her heart every day.

Gradually, day by day, her ideas about who she was as a “conscious person,” her ideas about the discovery of death, about what death was, began to dissolve. It was not given to her to even be the one who dies consciously. She became weaker and weaker, she no longer took food, she opened herself wide to death, but still she could not die. Sometimes she was a little confused, but more often than not she radiated love.

Everyone moved into Robin's house to be with her during her death. A week after the start of the process, she woke up in the morning and in her thin voice, like a bird’s, said: “Tonight it seemed to me that I had to leave my body. Jesus stood to my right and I asked him if he would take me, but he said “No” because the time had not yet come. All this is given to me so that I can learn to trust and endure. And now I’m still here.”

As the days passed, she had to give up even understanding how things were. She had to give up her knowledge and just be present. A few days later, when we woke up, I asked her, “What’s going on?” and she answered with extraordinary clarity, “I don’t know.” However, this “I don’t know” contained such a deep satisfaction that I had never heard in her words before. Finally, she did not know, and it was very good of her not to predict the course of the process, but to simply surrender to it. This allowed her to be even more present. She let go of each day as it came. She simply trusted the moment, not expecting anything from it. She stopped wondering when everything would happen. All that was left in her was surrender to God, only gentleness and openness to everything that could happen. Everything we imagine is lost in dying: personality, our sense of history, our goals, ideas and models are gone, and only consciousness remains. Every day she became more and more transparent. Trust and patience.

During the first days in the evenings, surrounded by her family, she prepared for death. But as the weeks passed, she no longer had any conscious preparation, only an ironic surprise at how things were happening. Sometimes from the outside it seemed that she was being born and not dying.

Here I will make a small digression and say that in all such stories about “conscious dying,” no matter how ideal it may be, sometimes there comes a time when the old mind makes itself known. Even patients who have achieved considerable clarity often have moments of confusion. There are situations when the mind becomes locked into some fears or desires. However, self-forgiveness and light sadness about the uncontrollability of events make it possible to soon cope with the condensation of the mind and regain a sense of spatiality.

When we all got together two weeks ago to see Robin off, none of us expected it to last so long. When I visited her the day before her supposed death, I expected to return home within a day or two. However, now twelve days had passed, and I had long been expected at the meditation seminar at which I was supposed to teach. It was obvious that she and I had done the necessary work. She was slowly melting out of herself, and what little help she might need could be given over the phone. Before I got into the car and headed to the seminar, which was five hundred miles away from her home, we decided that I would make “check-in calls” every day and help her if necessary. As I said goodbye to her, knowing that I would likely never see her in this form again, I noticed the way she blinked and the way she let go of my hand, and realized that she had very little affection or resistance left. Upon arriving at the seminar, I called her and found out that Robin was doing well and the process was continuing as usual. Every day I called her from the seminar and felt how little she now needed from others.

Whenever she had any confusion, we discussed it and laughed together at how much the mind clings to the old. Each time she returned to trust and tolerance. I watched how easily she regained her balance each time. One day, after I had been at the seminar for a week, I called and found Robin very agitated. “I might be losing my balance. I don’t know what’s happening to me, my mind is racing like crazy...” I asked her what had changed in her environment, and she said nothing, except that she could no longer swallow Brompton’s mixture, which she had been using it for several months to cope with the pain, so the doctor prescribed morphine suppositories. After thinking for a moment, I smiled. "Robin, what's surprising is that after taking a five-times-a-day regimen of cocaine, you feel attached to this old friend." “That’s it,” she said, and we laughed together. “I suppose I will have to part with this friend too.” Another opportunity to let go of attachment.”

A few days later, at five o'clock in the morning, while meditating with the first group, I began to feel pain in my chest. Watching this sensation intensify and deepen, after a few minutes I thought that I was experiencing a hallucination of a dying person. Not surprising, I thought, considering how many people I've been with when they died. I didn't know where this feeling was coming from, but all I could do was remain open to see what the next moment would bring. It felt like the pressure was pushing something out of my lungs. I had to focus on each breath. It felt like I had to consciously suck in oxygen to keep from passing out. As it became increasingly difficult for me to breathe and the pain spread throughout my chest, I felt the tendency of my body to contract after each breath, but as long as I remained open, I had space to experience.

So I stayed with what was happening, without naming it or even trying to understand it, but just trying to remain open to it. And then ten minutes later I heard Robin’s voice: “We were so close, we gave so much to each other, and although I can’t thank you enough, I know that you want to know how a dying person feels, and that’s why I share mine with you.” death". “Well, that’s a very interesting thought,” I thought to myself, “no matter what it is, true or false, it’s just a thought.” I had set myself up to “not know,” but I still felt like I was going through the process of dying, whatever the reasons. Every minute it became more and more difficult for me to breathe, and I felt my whole body filled with a sense of danger. The red light came on. Obviously something was happening that the body viewed as a threat. When I observed the body's attempts to become attached, fear appeared in me. It was as if the body was involuntarily trying to limit the fire inside, trying not to let it out, but the fire was burning its way through.

I tried to just breathe, not think about anything else, because I felt that if I was distracted, I would immediately lose consciousness. There was only pain in the body and a quiet whistle of air, which with great effort entered and left the lungs. After about twenty-five minutes, I began to feel so much pressure in my lungs that it felt like something was pushing me out, but I could not cope with it. I felt like I just had to give this feeling space, that any attempt to control it would make me explode. I felt like a tube of toothpaste that had been squeezed without unscrewing the cap. But suddenly the mind said, “Stay inside? For what?" – and there was no answer.

Suddenly a great peace came over me. My values ​​changed greatly: leaving my body seemed completely appropriate, and there was no reason to resist or become attached. I felt like I remembered something I had forgotten when I was born. After that, the pressure in my chest seemed completely natural to me. I realized that it was doing exactly what it was supposed to do: pushing me out of my body. Wonderful! Death was no longer a threat. In fact, it became another meaningless bubble in the flow of change and carried with it a sense of joyful anticipation. She seemed to be telling me: “Why stay in the body? How could you be so stupid as to hold on to it? Everything is in perfection!” I was filled with the realization that everything was as it should be. In light of this understanding, I stopped seeing pain and pressure as enemies, and instead saw them as friends. It was very nice. This did not contradict my intentions, but was quite consistent with them. Priorities have changed: “Let it happen, keep going, keep going, let everything be the way it should be!” The pain was still there, but the opening was enormous. I no longer clung to life. My life extended beyond my body. “Oh, that’s how it should be; everything happens perfectly!” And again I heard in my heart the voice of Robin, who said: “And now it is time to cease being Robin and become the dying Christ,” and then the experience became not even like identifying with the one who was dying, with me or with her; it was just a completely evolving process. Now I felt not like a body, but like a karmic knot, a process in its next perfect stage, consciousness emerging from a vessel, death, which is just another part of life. Silence.

When the ringing of the bell signaled the end of the meditation, the mind asked, “What was that? Maybe an interesting hallucination, or maybe... who knows.” I stood up, but I still felt pain in my chest. Arriving for breakfast, I had not yet had time to touch the food when they called me to the phone. Brother Robin called. She just died.

This incident made me understand the importance of what we do. I understood why people who had died very hard experienced major changes in their final moments, overcoming the seeming opening beyond all the unfinished business, fears and attachments they had had up until that time. For some of them, this “understanding” came several days and even weeks before death. For others, it seemed to open only a moment before death. I was always surprised by the photographs of the dead in Auschwitz, because there was no suffering on their faces. It was a phenomenon that I could not understand before, but now it seemed obvious to me: at some time - perhaps a moment before the life leaves the body - they comprehend the perfection of what is happening. In fact, this experience can be very common. Perhaps even those who have been very attached are encountered with perfection and fearlessness at the moment of death.

Robin had to give up everything. It became just an open space. Her death was no longer something added to a personal story. In fact, death was for her a merging with that part of her that was the open heart of Jesus.

Giving up all her ideas about death—even “conscious death”—she stepped into the radiant truth.

When we become familiar with the great variety of spiritual literature, with the biographies of saints, with the tradition of composing poems before death, with stories of many Zen masters dying with humor and ease, we see again and again examples of conscious dying of people who honor their body, but they part with him without any regret. Such people finish their work at every moment. They live their lives, as Suzuki Roshi puts it, “without leaving a trace.”

It is this life without a trace, this constant dying to everything that happens, that allows us to go to sleep every evening with that dispassion and completeness that the realization gives that there is nothing more to do and nothing is left undone. Perhaps Suzuki Roshi had something similar in mind when he said: “Even if the sun has risen in the west, there is only one path for the bodhisattva, the wise being who serves us all.”

The great Japanese poet Basho wrote: “Since ancient times there has been a custom of leaving behind a poem of death, and perhaps I should write such a poem too. But every moment of life is the last, every poem is a poem of death! Why, then, should I write another one? In this last hour of mine I have no poem.” When Master Takuan was dying, his students asked him to write a poem of death, but he refused. They insisted, and then he wrote one hieroglyph for “dream” and walked away.

When we hear stories like this, we fear that such deep awareness, such openness in the dying process is not available to us. However, I have been convinced more than once that this is not so. Death often allows us to bring out the best in us. For many, a life lived in the pursuit of truth is not in vain.

One day a woman called me and asked: “Is it true that you help people die deliberately?”

A few days later Pam came to meet us. She said she felt it was time to go deeper because her melanoma was rapidly progressing. She had been dealing with the disease for several years, but now it seemed to be getting worse. She said she had been meditating on her own, but because she now felt like she was dying, she wanted to work with us. She said she wanted to use death as a means to achieve the peace she had been missing. She seemed to be able to find her way through heart opening, so we recommended the Jesus Prayer to her: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”

Gradually, as she prayed, her heart began to soften. A few days later she went to the hospital for a minor bladder operation, during which she was supposed to remove a tumor that was causing a lot of trouble. She had previously undergone the same operation, but then she felt very uncomfortable in the hospital. Now her heart was so full that she took everything very lightly and said that the hospital reminded her of a temple. The experiences in her body reminded her to be present. But thoughts of danger, constantly arising in her mind, interrupted her meditation.

“The mind keeps interfering with my heart,” she said.

– Do these two really live inside you? What is the difference between them? – I asked.

“Two only exist when I identify with fear in my mind,” she replied.

She continued to work, and gradually her mind calmed down. Eventually he became completely obedient to his heart. “Nothing is separate from God except what we think is separate,” Pam said.

For months we worked through the process of our development, and she sometimes felt the sacred heart of Jesus beating in her weak chest. As she talked to her four children about the process she was going through, she continued to follow the doctor's instructions, not worrying as much as she had before about making sure the treatment was "effective." She said it was effective to the extent that she paid attention to the changes taking place and noticed how the mind grasped the possibility of healing the body. Sometimes, when she felt better, she said that her mind automatically generated scenarios of her healing, which, as it seemed to her, was about to happen by the grace of Christ.

But she maintained her openness, her “I don’t know,” and allowed such thoughts to float freely in the warmth and tolerance of her heart. She simply continued to open herself to the oneness that included life and death. When she had fear, she faced it with humility and willingness, which gave room for further growth. There is practically no resistance left in her.

A few months after our first meeting, Pam attended our five-day workshop in Santa Cruz, California, eighty miles from her home. After a day and a half of living at the seminar, she began to feel a severe headache. She gradually became speechless. One day, she said, she woke up and, starting to speak, found that her words were like “a mixture of letters thrown into the air.” “How great it is! – she said afterwards. “I was a lawyer for a long time, a “spokesman of the truth,” as they put it, and now my words make no sense at all. And talk about the mercy of Christ! It's good that I can't talk about it anymore. I won’t need words anymore,” and she laughed heartily.

As the pain in her head began to intensify, she lay down in her room and seemed to go into a mild coma. Several friends gathered around her, but no one could help her. Lying on the bed, she writhed and moaned, and even the painkiller they gave her did not help. She felt very bad, her mouth was dry, drops of sweat poured out on her forehead, and her whole body was shaking with unbearable pain.

Sitting next to her bed, I felt like I was praying that she would be freed from these hellish pains that seemed to constrict her entire body. However, the pain continued, and everyone in the room had to surrender to its intensity. I soon returned to teach a group in the evening, but soon they called me and said: “Pam seems to be very unwell. Perhaps she is dying. You'd better be with her." When I entered the room, I felt something that I had not noticed before. I knelt down next to her bed and unexpectedly said to myself: “Pam, Christ is here.” Suddenly her expression changed and the heaviness seemed to leave her. She went into what could be called pure ecstasy, which for the next few hours was so intense that no one could be near her without feeling a surge of joy. Her whole body seemed to radiate compassion and transcendental love. People left the room saying, “I’m embarrassed to admit how high I went when I was around her. I should be sad because I know very well how this will end, but for some reason I feel amazing.”

A few hours later, Pam went into a coma again, but was still filled with joy and peace. The doctor arrived and was about to give her more painkillers, but she looked so whole in her silence that he decided not to disturb her balance. This reminded me of a doctor who a year ago came to see a patient with whom we were working at the time. She just managed to soften her resistance and open up to suffering. “I came to help her,” he said, “but now I understand that I must learn from her.”

One of Pam's friends, fearing that she was dying, called her relatives and asked to be taken home. A few hours later, her ex-husband entered the room, expecting everything, anything from the people he called “suicide bombers.” His ex-wife surrounded by several people whose faces beamed with energy, and everyone entering the room immediately felt it. He sat down next to her, unable to say a word, and must have thought only about getting her out of this strange environment as quickly as possible. But there was such peace in the room, such silence! There were no problems, nothing mattered. She was simply dying. An hour later we were walking down the street with him, and he said: “You know, five years have passed since I left the path. I have lost God. But after what I've seen here, I think I'm starting to understand what it all means."

Soon after, her children arrived and sat near the bed just like everyone else. It was part of an invaluable process in which we all had the privilege of participating. The thirteen-year-old twins had a much harder time accepting it than the older daughters. From the very beginning, the twins could not come to terms with their mother’s illness, but now this has become possible. No one in the room imposed suffering on themselves, and no one pushed it away. The sadness was appropriate, and so was the embarrassment. They could do whatever they wanted. They didn't have to pretend to be saints. They didn't have to be like everyone else. And soon they, too, became part of this mandala of love and acceptance that formed around Pam, who was calmly lying on the bed.

Her family decided it was the best place for her and for them the same. They were given a room to stay in for a few days to see off Pam, who was about to embark on a new journey of consciousness.

Two more days passed, during which Pam was in a coma-like state. Her room was filled with quiet joy and a sense of perfection. But the seminar was supposed to end in a few days, and it was unclear whether she would die by then or not. So in the evening, when everyone went to dinner, I sat down next to her and said: “Today is Thursday, it’s evening, my friend. The seminar ends tomorrow. It seems to me that if you are going to die, then today is the time to do it, because tomorrow the traveling circus will leave the city." Soon after, she emerged from her coma and began to speak. She said she felt good, “really quite light,” and that she had no pain at all. Bending over her like a specialist, I thought that perhaps she had unfinished business, and asked:

– Is there anything you would like to do before you die?

“Yes,” she answered, laughing, “to live another ten years.”

The next day she went home with her family.

A few days later I came to her house. Entering her room, I felt a great space around her. My thoughts seemed like bouncing balls in it. How clumsy each of them was in this silence! My mind was so heavy compared to this soft space because in my mind she was not caught. There was only space. And I remembered a friend who told me about his attendance at a seminar led by a Zen master. Entering the master for the next interview, each time it seemed to my friend that the master knew what he was thinking about. One day he came to the master and complained:

“When I walk in here, it seems to me that you know what I’m thinking.”

Roshi looked at him with a smile.

“Well, I’m not thinking about anything, which means it’s clearly something wrong with you,” he replied.

Pam wasn't attached to anything either. It seemed that she was no longer “someone”. There was a sense of unity in her room. She seemed to have no boundaries.

She looked at me softly and said in bewilderment:

“You know, a few days ago, when I came out of a coma, Maharaji was sitting on my bed and kept laughing, laughing, laughing.

I was a little surprised at her spontaneous connection with Maharaji, since for several months her point of contact with reality had been Jesus. No one ever asked her to think about Maharaji. It seemed like something that arose on its own. So I asked her:

– What about your connection with Jesus?

“There’s nothing surprising here,” she said. “Jesus deals with suffering, but I don’t suffer anymore.” At the same time, Maharaji represents pure joy for me.

In the following weeks, she twice again went into three-day coma-like states. She called them “vacations” and said that she could not adequately describe what happened to her during this time. Nevertheless, according to her, the “vacation” was reminiscent of being in the world of Greek chorales Orthodox Church, which one friend gave her to listen to on a tape recorder.

– From everything I know, the best way to describe these spaces is the full-sounding church singing, - she said.

Every time she came out of the coma, she would start to have pain, but after a while there would be relief again, and there would be no problems at all. After each cycle, which began with coma and ended with relief, it became clearer and more transparent. That doesn't mean she didn't have difficult moments. Sometimes she felt lost. Sometimes she really didn’t want to die, seeing her children nearby. Melodramas occasionally played out in her room. But it became more and more just space. The only thing she read was the treatise of the Third Zen Patriarch.

Tara, who had cared for Pam so much in the previous months, later told me: “One day, during one of her usual comatose states, I noticed that Pam's eyes were wide open and she seemed to be looking into the distance. She repeated in a whisper: “Sun, sun, end, end,” and tears flowed from her eyes... Even when she began to suffer from incontinence, I was pleased to do the most unpleasant work for her. It never occurred to me to complain. I was only thinking about how we could purify ourselves so much that her innocence would touch our hearts.”

On Christmas morning, Pam was helped down to the dining room to be with her family one last time. When she returned upstairs, it was clear that she was beginning to leave her body. The most interesting thing was that, as those around her noticed, she no longer had a personality. Time passed, and it opened up more and more, becoming like space. It was like a process occurring in awareness, which is indivisible. Someone said about her: “She is no longer a noun, she is a verb.”

A day or two later, surrounded by friends, she gave birth to herself. She was like space dissolving into space. There was not the slightest feeling of pushing or pulling. She seemed to be watching this whole process in bewilderment. Tara later said: “The room seemed to be filled with love and serenity. Everyone silently experienced serenity. Pam calmly stopped breathing and slipped out of her body. A tear rolled down her cheek and she left.” This was leaving a temporary form, a transition.

When Taji Roshi, the modern Zen master, was dying, his chief disciples gathered around his bed. One of them, knowing that Roshi liked a certain type of cake, spent half a day looking for them in pastry shops in Tokyo and now presented them to Taji Roshi. With a faint smile, the dying Roshi took a piece of the cake and began to chew it slowly. He was gradually overcome by weakness, and then the disciples approached him and asked if he had anything to say to them before he died.

“Yes,” replied Roshi. The students held their breath so as not to miss a single word.

“My dears, this cake was very tasty,” he said and died.

When such beings die, they expand beyond themselves. They simply leave, leaving behind a handful of ashes.


* * *

WHO IS DYING?

We're all crazy in prison -
We live too long in the body.
And on the day of your death
Maharaji whispered:
"Today I'm being released forever
From the central prison to
Freedom."
But we don't live in a body,
And the body lives in us;
In its life it depends on us
(And we are not from him).
Jesus said:
“I am the light.”
All of us.
Ever shining.


Nature