Interestingly enough, this proof increasingly comes from science, or rather from scientists who are prepared not to stubbornly reject new findings if they dont fit into the previous concept, but investigate them.

And that brings us back to the subject of death and dying, to the branch of science that relates directly to it: thanatology - death research.

A few decades ago, and even earlier, a person whose brain functions had failed died in most cases. It was rather rare for a quasi-dead person to wake up again and live on.

But that has changed radically today. Medicine has made great progress, and many people can be revived from the threshold of death, where the heart stands still and the brain no longer has any function, and brought back into earthly life.

After the two pioneers of modern death research, Raimond Moody and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, fascinated interested people worldwide with their pioneering discoveries in the late 1970s and managed to draw the attention of a broad public to the subject of death, other death researchers turned to this area with systematic studies. Renowned European death researchers are currently the German Bernard Jakoby and the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel.

For cardiac specialists, it is a frequent experience that reanimation attempts are successful on patients whose heart has come to a standstill. After all death researchers repeatedly reported similar experiences of clinically dead people, it was van Lommel's merit to carry out a systematic, so-called prospective study on 344 reanimated patients for the first time and to ask them about possible near-death experiences (NDE). A questionnaire was distributed to the patients as soon as possible after their resuscitation and this survey was repeated after two and eight years to find out whether and how the NDE had affected their future lives. It turned out that 18% of the respondents, i.e. about one in five, had actually lived through a partial, sometimes even a complete NDE in all phases, and that the experience really had a life-determining, long-lasting effect! The people were changed afterwards, turned to other values and almost without exception lost the fear of death!

Van Lommel was able to prove in this sensational study that physiological, i.e. physical factors such as the duration of cardiac arrest, oxygen deficiency, medication had no influence on the experience of NDE. Furthermore, factors from which one would expect a great influence, such as ethnicity, nation, culture and above all religious orientation played no role. Even convinced atheists had NDE, which usually had such an effect on their further lives that, like almost all others, they developed into more spiritual people. Among confessionally oriented people, it was common for their interest in the practice of their religion to decrease significantly and they turned instead to spiritual questions, such as the meaning of life, and the associated desire to develop more capacity for love in their lives, and so on.

With this large-scale study the cardiologist van Lommel proved a scientifically sensational result, which is that consciousness exists independently of the body!

Let us now turn to the most important and frequent phases of the NTEs, which can be divided into the following areas of experience according to Jakoby:

Many people realize in this state with absolute clarity that they have died. They leave the body, float above it and can often move with great speed to distant places. I quote a statement: "Time seemed to have ceased to exist. The first thing I noticed was that I was dead, very clearly. I looked at my body from above, but was not upset, I was dead, and it didn't bother me."

How can the described and the following descriptions be explained at all? I would like to anticipate here and ask you to first accept the existence of a soul as a working hypothesis, which we can imagine as follows: It looks very similar to our earthly, visible body, is like magnetically connected to it and is animated by our spiritual core, our spirit. This finer body of the soul does not mix with our earthly body, but only penetrates it and, as already said, is held in a kind of magnetism as long as the magnetic force of both bodies is strong enough.

In the majority of cases a great peace comes after leaving the body, and as a further experience, absence of pain. Especially people who have had intense pain before, of course, experience it as delightful to be completely free of it suddenly.

Here I would like to stay a little longer and tell you about some of the most amazing cases that are easily enough to make the most materialist ponder.

It is important to say in advance that all patients are in the stage of so-called "brain death", so the brain curve is zero and the patient is actually dead according to scientific interpretation!

Basically it can be said that in this phase of the out-of-body experience of the "brain death" a handicapped body is again intact. Blind people can see, deaf people can hear, wheelchair users can walk, missing or amputated limbs are present again, in short: the body is complete and whole again, since it is not the physical body, but the next ethereal body!

This, of course, is not conclusive. However, it is different in the numerous cases where things can be verified that the person would normally not have been able to know. When blind people are able to describe the exact details of an accident including appearance, clothing and hair colour of their rescuers, this is of course very evidential.

Jakoby describes the case of a woman named Sabine Uhlig, whose cesarean birth had severe complications. She detached herself from her body, floated into the next room and saw the nurses bathing the newborn daughter. Then she thought of her nine-year-old son, who was currently on Sylt-Island with his choir. Immediately she was with him and saw him at lunch. Later she even went to Sylt herself to see the hotel - it was exactly as she had experienced it during her near-death experience (NDE).

There can also be situation comedy cases. In another case, according to Jakoby, a man climbed over the hospital roof during his operation and saw a sneaker lying on the roof. Of course the hospital-staff didn't believe him, but they looked anyway; and there was a sneaker on the roof.

During an operation, a 43-year-old patient memorized the company name plate including the type designation of a medical device, which he could not possibly have seen directly from his lying position during the operation.

The cardiologist van Lommel describes the report of a paramedic: "A man was found unconscious in the park, already blue. While inserting a breathing tube, the paramedic noticed that the man was wearing a set of teeth, which he took out for safety reasons and put it into the drawer of a medicine cabinet. Only with great effort and after a long time was it possible to resuscitate the completely unconscious man; the doctors were about to give him up. Later the resuscitated man reported of his out-of-body experience, including the fact that he had repeatedly tried to influence the doctors in such a way that they should not cease their efforts to resuscitate him. Days later, the paramedic accidentally came into the patient's room, and his jaw fell down when the patient smilingly said, "Ah, there's the man who knows where my teeth are."

One of the best documented cases of a far-reaching NDE in America happened with cardiologist Michael Sabom and his colleague, neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler, whom German death researcher Jakoby describes in his book "The Bridge to Light":

Country singer Pam Reynolds had a dangerous blood clot on her brainstem artery, which could only be removed by an equally dangerous operation: The blood had to be completely removed from the brain for a while. The body temperature was reduced to 15 degrees Celsius to prevent brain death that was too rapid. The surgeon opened Pam's skull with a bone saw. Using a heart-lung machine, the blood was lowered and removed from the entire body. The heart stopped beating, the EEG showed the zero line and a measuring device at the ear showed the suspension of the brain stem functions.

Pam Reynolds was actually clinically dead at that time until she was resuscitated by electroshocks. During that time, the woman had a wide near-death experience: she had acoustic and visual perceptions of the operation that were strikingly consistent with the surgical protocols. The operating star-surgeon Robert Spetzler freely admits that he cannot explain these perceptions to himself.

We will come back to the case later.

With these cases of the experience of so-called brain-dead people I would like to leave it at that for time reasons. If you are interested in further descriptions, you will find countless other cases in the corresponding literature or on the website thanatos.tv, which is listed at the end.

So these three first phases of the NDE still have a lot to do with the perception of the physical, that is earthly world. And as we have just seen, many amazing experiences have a high probative value precisely because, despite the total failure of the brain, experiences have taken place that would not have been possible even for a fully conscious and alert person!

Let us go on to the further phases of the NTEs:

Probably the best-known and most widespread component of an NDE. Thousands and thousands of reports of reanimated people describe the passage through a tunnel, at the end of which in most cases an intense, beautiful, strongly attracting light shines, towards which the people with NDE then move. So in this phase the experience of the physical world changes into the ethereal tunnel and light vision.

Very often there is a subsequent encounter with people who have already died, with whom there was usually a more intimate relationship. Or they are light beings who are regarded as very superior.

Now it happens occasionally that already children are dying due to a serious illness or an accident. If we consider which people are the most important caregivers in this case, there can hardly be any doubt: the parents!

But in no case were the children picked up by their parents if these were alive, but by grandparents or other, already deceased persons, or friends, or light beings. That is important to know!

Because also these cases sometimes have a high evidentiary value, if it concerns either persons, whom humans with NDE never knew, or if nobody could know that humans had died, sometimes immediately before!

The cardiologist Pim van Lommel describes the following case in his book "Endless Consciousness":

"One patient told me that during his NDE, caused by cardiac arrest, he saw not only his deceased grandmother, but also a man who looked at him lovingly, but whom he did not know. More than ten years later, his mother told him on her deathbed that he was an illegitimate child. His father was a Jew who was deported and who died during the Second World War. His mother showed him a picture: It was the unknown man he had seen during his near-death experience. This man was his biological father." ( retranslated from the German edition.)

From Jakoby's book: "The Bridge to Light" pp. 47 - 2: "Seven-year-old Cory, who was already suffering from incurable leukaemia at the age of three, had several out-of-body experiences in the last months before his death. On one occasion he told his mother that he had met an old friend from her high school days who was crippled by a car accident. The mother had never mentioned the man to Cory ... and yet Cory knew the man. He came up to him during Cory's vision and introduced himself to his mother as an old childhood friend. He should tell his mother that he can walk now. Phone conversations confirmed that the old friend had died on the very day Cory had the vision. In another experience, the little boy met a friend who had been in the hospital a week before. The next day, the family learned that Cory's friend had died unexpectedly the night before."

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross also reports a serious accident in which two children were taken to different hospitals. Immediately before her death, the girl said with a happy expression on her face: "Peter is already here! Peter was her brother, and immediately after that a call came from the other clinic that he had just died, too, after he had been admitted there seriously injured!

From this example it can be seen, by the way, as from countless other cases, that such an experience does not only exist in NDEs of resuscitated patients, but that it is also an extraordinarily common phenomenon in the normal dying of many people. These often oscillate, especially at the end of long and serious illnesses, between this world and the hereafter and have the corresponding experiences.

They often stretch out their arms towards a goal that is visible to them but invisible to us and often exclaim in astonishment: "Howard, Elisabeth, are you here? The two are then always already pre-deceased good acquaintances, friends or relatives, or of course often their parents.

Many relatives are afraid of something like this; in general, this is dismissed with hallucinations. And also some doctors administer psychotropic drugs in this situation, which is of course the silliest thing one can do. What is missing is the knowledge, the realization that the afterlife is a very real world into which the dying person is about to enter!

So a good friend told me about the death of her father, who was atheistic in his attitude. Suddenly he said in highest astonishment, since he could not believe it himself: "There stands an angel"; thus the meeting with a light being.

People who go further in their NDE usually experience the most transforming element, the experience of light.

It is experienced as the encounter with a kind of pure love and brightness. Here a description: "I went directly into the most wonderful golden light. Real true love! Such peace, security, peace. I thought of nothing and did not worry. My wonderful golden light was all around me, it penetrated me! ... Today I still feel the light in me and feel surrounded by it."

Experiencing this experience of light leads most people to change their lives from the ground up in a constructive, loving direction.

For many people with NDE, the life they have led so far runs like a time-lapse film in their mind's eye. Here is a description taken by the death researchers Ring and Valarino: "I saw my life, lived it again. Everything I had ever felt, I felt again - every cut, every pain, every feeling and everything that belonged to that particular stage of my life. At the same time I saw the impact of my life on my fellow human beings ... I felt everything they felt and I understood the consequences of all my actions, good and bad".

The result for all of us is that the review of life can be quite unpleasant and frightening when we have to realize how many opportunities we missed, how many egoisms we lived, how many fellow human beings we consciously or unconsciously hurt, how much we spent our lifetime with vanities and thus not infrequently lived more or less bypassing the meaning of our life.

Perhaps you are familiar with the saying: "No one has come back yet", with which one would like to express that one cannot know anything about a life after death and therefore of course does not have to worry about it - after all, this is the most comfortable, but also superficial way.

In reality, however, many thousands of people who have taken a look into the hereafter have come back through the resuscitation alone, for otherwise they could logically tell us nothing more about it; they would have finally crossed the threshold and would be mourned by us as dead. That these reports have nothing to do with a crazy brain, a lack of oxygen, hormone secretions, a lively imagination or a pathological need for recognition has now been scientifically proven, especially by Pim van Lommel. Many facts are also reliable, of which, as we have seen, the people concerned with NDE had no knowledge, or could not have gained knowledge.

It is also striking that almost all people who have experienced a far-reaching NDE change their whole life from this point on, suddenly see the previous, more headstrong objectives such as wealth, prestige, professional career, a luxurious house or a showy car as very unimportant and instead think more holistically, attach more importance to empathy, social utility and loving interaction with fellow human beings and also concern themselves more intensively with the meaning of life.

For the sake of completeness, it must not be concealed that not all NDEs contain only light, joy, beauty and love, but there are also extremely anxious NDEs, the so-called experiences of hell, into which some people with NDEs get into. Here it can come to a stagnation in the tunnel, to contact with dark figures, a gruesome environment or the experience of an existentially threatening emptiness.

When these people come back, they first have to come to terms with this traumatic experience, which can take many years. Mostly, however, this also leads them to rethink their previous lives, to change, and to go purposefully in a more constructive direction.

Often, however, the experiences are so beautiful that for many the return to the body is rather reluctant, sometimes even involuntary. If people return voluntarily, it is usually because they do not want to leave their family, children or friends behind alone, or because they realize that there are too many unfinished tasks to be done on earth.

If, however, the so-called final death occurs, clairvoyants or people to whom the relatives who have passed over show themselves in intensive, so-called dreams of truth, report again and again that they cannot understand the exaggerated grief of the relatives, because they are doing well and it is precisely this grief, the inability of the relatives to allow them to go away, that burdens them the most.

The woman with the brain operation mentioned in the first part of the lecture, Pam Reynolds, also had a complete NDE here, presumably due to the long duration of the operation. She experiences the tunnel passage where she also meets her grandmother and afterwards the bright light, which became bigger and bigger.

Here, however, she is prevented by her relatives from going on and being sent back against her will. She describes the return like this:

"... and I saw this thing, my body. I did not want to enter it. It looked terrible. I looked at him as he was: dead! ... I felt that I was definitely pushed back and pulled by the body at the same time. The body pulled and the tunnel pressed ... It was like in a basin of ice water ... It hurt!" ( retranslated from the German edition).

In this context I would like to remind you that Pam Reynold's body had to be cooled down to 15 degrees due to surgery. Jakoby says about this case: "Here we have a concrete proof not only of an out-of-body experience, but of the authenticity of a near-death experience independent of bodily functions".

So let us try to wring our way through to the not easy step that when a dear fellow human being dies we are confronted with a great, natural, even consecrated event and let us try not to disturb it with our own, mostly egoistic wishes.

At this point I would therefore like to present you with a quotation from a work that enables me in the first place to make statements that go beyond the general knowledge: the "Grail Message - In the Light of Truth". It contains 168 lectures on all essential questions of being human and is also a complete explanation of Creation. One lecture is called "Death" and contains, among other things, the following statements:

1. the existence of a Beyond, and

2. the existence of a consciousness that is independent of the human body, that can move freely and that we can call Soul.

The fact of a life after death can therefore be regarded as proven!

On the other hand, despite the presentation of the many fascinating experiences, we are still almost at the very beginning, because normally the possibility of resuscitation, which gives us all the amazing phenomena, is only in the range of 5 to max. 10 minutes and therefore says little about our further way after leaving the earth. Very important questions are therefore still unanswered, e.g.:

Why do we live on earth at all, and why do we have to die?

Do we really only have one chance on earth, or do we perhaps live several times?

What happens to us after we die? Are there Laws of Creation that determine our further way in the Beyond?

But in the context of this article that would be too much and would go beyond its scope!

For all this information I would like to recommend the "Grail Message - In the Light of Truth", in which not only that, but finally the entire Creation structure, the Laws of Creation, our integration into it and thus the meaning of our life are conclusively explained. This is a decisive help in life, which I would therefore like to recommend to you!