IMMEDIATE RETURN AFTER DEATH

CASES OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY

It is common to find the newspapers’ report of cases of persons who return to life two or three hours after death. These persons are those whose identity has been mistaken by the Yama-Dutas or the Messengers of the Lord of Death. Two persons bearing the same name, answering to the same description, and living probably in the same village or town or city, are mistaken by the Messengers of Death, one for the other, and the wrong person is taken to the Lord of Death, only to be returned to life soon on discovery, and the right person conducted, at the same time, to the halls of Yama.

Here I present the case of Sri C. Reddy of Andhra Pradesh, in his own words. He writes, “It is common knowledge as gathered from scriptures that after a human being casts off his mortal coil, the messengers of the Lord of Death descend down to escort the astral body of the dead person, to the Loka ordained for him in accordance with his Karmas, Prarabdha or Purushartha. Those teachings of the Hindu scriptures have to be believed in before one may understand or accept the truthfulness of experience. I am going to relate my own personal case. But the reader, be he a believer or a non-believer in these teachings, is nevertheless going to experience sooner or later the same phenomena when his Prana, or the last breath stops to function, i.e., when he dies.

“I was born in an Indian princely family of South India. After the advent of the Independence of India and the rule of the Congress Government, the rulers and princes of my kind became ordinary citizens of India, devoid of the previous rights, privileges and way of living, but are given only a scanty pension. Having always pursued the religious life, now at the age of 73, I am a recluse and have taken shelter at the feet of my Guru Swami Sivananda Sarasvati of Rishikesh, a realised Sage. The truth of my experience is as follows:

“In 1948, suffering from severe malaria, I became anaemic, and my doctor, a relative, gave me certain injections of insulin, which sent me into unconsciousness or coma, and forthwith I was removed to the Nursing Home nearby where I was given injection after injection to get heat into my body, but inwardly the doctor had concluded that I was dead and he had caused the news of my demise to be wired to my daughter.

“What was really meant to be the death-state, I did really experience. The doctor’s judgment was not far wrong though he had not expected my death. When I had stopped breathing physically, my astral body or soul was caught hold of by two tall black Yama-Dutas who escorted me to the Yama-Loka with great speed. It was 11 a.m. and we reached our destination within 20 minutes. I saw the God of Death, Yama seated on a golden pedestal. En route I was instructed and warned by the Messengers to maintain complete silence before the Dharmaraja unless directly questioned. Unto Dharmaraja I reverentially prostrated. He asked in whispers the man seated on the ground in front of Him to refer to my life-record-book, and he began to turn over pages one way and the other. Their conversation I could not follow, except at the end when Dharmaraja ordered the same Yama-Dutas to take me back to the mortal world, from which I concluded that I was the wrong man brought by the messengers, and perhaps somebody else answering to my name and description was destined to die at that moment.”

Many people have had the curious experience of visiting some place which by all available evidence they could never have seen previously but where they felt at once the conviction: “I have been here before.”

Sometimes the impression is stronger so that one can say with confidence that around the next corner there will be a shop with windows containing a clearly-perceived arrangement of goods or a house with strongly individual configurations; and one is only mildly surprised when the corner is turned and the impression is confirmed.

I remember, during the war, inviting an explanation of this not unusual phenomenon from a professor who had come to talk about psychology to an extremely sceptical gathering of troops. The best answer he could offer was a kind of synthesis of associated ideas, for instance, that in one place you had subconsciously registered the arrangement of a picture and an ornament, in another way a vase was placed on a table, in a third the gleam of brass from trophies ranged above the hearth, and that suddenly, for no very clear reason, some particular room reminded you of all these things at the same time, and established a sensation of familiarity.

The explanation was a good attempt, but so obviously unsatisfactory that I did not press one of the classic instances of “recollections” which seems to support the claims of those who believe in the ancient theory of reincarnation.