Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander's NDE

Eben Alexander was an experienced neurosurgeon at the time of his near-death and his astonishing experience and recovery. At age fifty-four, he was struck by a rare illness and thrown into a coma for seven days. “During that time,” he writes, “my entire neocortex—the outer surface of the brain, the part that makes us human—was shut down.”

“When your brain is absent, you are absent, too. As a neurosurgeon, I’d heard many stories over the years of people who had strange experiences, usually after suffering cardiac arrest: stories of traveling to mysterious, wonderful landscapes; of talking to dead relatives—even to meeting God Himself. Wonderful stuff, no question. But all of it, in my opinion, was pure fantasy.”

In the coma, he first was aware of: “Darkness, but a visible darkness—like being submerged in mud yet also being able to see through it. Or maybe dirty Jell-O describes it better. Transparent, but in a blurry, claustrophobic, suffocating kind of way.

“Consciousness, but consciousness without memory of identity—like a dream where you know what’s going on around you, but have no real idea of who, or what, you are.

“Language, emotion, logic: these were all gone, as if I had regressed back to some state of being from the very beginnings of life, as far back, perhaps, as the primitive bacteria that, unbeknownst to me, had taken over my brain and shut it down.

“Something had appeared in the darkness. Turning slowly, it radiated fine filaments of white-gold light, and as it did so the darkness around me began to splinter and break apart.

“Then I heard a new sound: a living sound, like the richest, most complex, most beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard. Growing in volume as a pure white light descended, it obliterated the monotonous mechanical pounding that, seemingly for eons, had been my only company up until then.

“The light got closer and closer, spinning around and around and generating those filaments of pure white light that I now saw were tinged, here and there, with hints of gold. Then, at the very center of the light, something else appeared. I focused my awareness, hard, trying to figure out what it was. An opening. I was no longer looking at the slowly spinning light at all, but through it.

“The moment I understood this, I began to move up. Fast. There was a whooshing sound, and in a flash I went through the opening and found myself in a completely new world. The strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen."

Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012).