Eben Alexander's NDE - 6

After seven days in a coma, Dr. Wade met with Alexander’s wife, Holley, and her close friend, Sylvia, and said to them: If Eben doesn’t show some real improvement within the next twelve hours, we will probably recommend discussing termination of antibiotics. A week in coma with severe bacterial meningitis is already beyond the limits of any reasonable expectation of recovery. Given those prospects, it might be better to let nature take its course.

Alexander’s young son, Bond, who had been listening at the door, ran back into his father’s hospital room and climbed up onto his bed.

“Then he pulled up my eyelids and said, directly into my empty, unfocused eyes, You’re going to be okay, Daddy. You’re going to be okay. He kept on repeating it, believing, in his child’s way, that if he said it enough times, surely he would make it true.

“Sylvia went into the ICU room and stood by the bed next to Bond, as he sat silently rubbing my hand . . . as Sylvia and Bond stared into my slack face, resolutely refusing to accept what they had just heard from the doctor, something happened. My eyes opened.

“Sylvia quickly brought Holley and Dr. Wade into the room, and Dr. Wade carefully extracted the breathing tube from Alexander’s throat.

All is well, I said, radiating that blissful message as much as speaking the words. I looked at each of them, deeply, acknowledging the divine miracle of our very existence. Don’t worry . . . all is well, I repeated, to assuage any doubt.

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

 

Eben Alexander's NDE - 5

“The view of human consciousness held by most scientists today is that it is composed of digital information—data, that is, of essentially the same kind used by computers. Though some bits of this data—seeing a spectacular sunset, hearing a beautiful symphony for the first time, even falling in love—may feel more profound or special to us than the countless other bits of information created and stored in our brains, this is really just an illusion. All bits are, in fact, qualitatively the same. Our brains model outside reality by taking the information that comes in through our sense and transforming it into a rich digital tapestry. But our perceptions are just a model—not reality itself. An illusion.

“To understand how the brain might actually block our access to knowledge of the higher world, we need to accept—at least hypothetically and for the moment—that the brain itself doesn’t produce consciousness. That it is, instead, a kind of reducing valve or filter, shifting the larger, nonphysical consciousness that we possess in the nonphysical worlds down into a more limited capacity for the duration of our mortal life.

“There is, from the earthly perspective, a very definite advantage to this. Just as our brains work hard every moment of our waking lives to filter out the barrage of sensory information coming at us from our physical surroundings, selecting the material we actually need in order to survive, so it is that forgetting our trans-earthly identities also allows us to be ‘here and now’ far more effectively. Just as most of ordinary life holds too much information for us to take in at once, being excessively conscious of the worlds beyond the here and now would slow down our progress even more. If we knew too much of the spiritual realm now, then navigating our lives on earth would be an even greater challenge than it already is.

“Why am I so sure of all this? For two reasons. The first is that I was shown it (by the beings who taught me when I was in the Gateway and the Core), and the second is because I actually experienced it.

“Free will is of central importance for our function in the earthly realm: a function that, we will one day discover, serves the much higher role of allowing our ascendance in the timeless alternate dimension. Our life down here may seem insignificant, for it is minute in relation to the other lives and other worlds that also crowd the invisible and visible universes. But it is also hugely important, for our role here is to grow toward the Divine, and that growth is closely watched by the beings in the worlds above—the souls and lucent orbs (those beings I saw originally far above me in the Gateway, and which I believe are the origin of our culture’s concept of angels).

“We—the spiritual beings currently inhabiting our evolutionarily developed mortal brains and bodies, the product of the earth and the exigencies of the earth—make the real choices. True thought is not the brain’s affair. But we have—in part by the brain itself—been so trained to associate our brains with what we think and who we are that we have lost the ability to realize that we are at all times much more than the physical brains and bodies that do—or should do—our bidding.

“How do we get closer to this genuine spiritual self? By manifesting love and compassion. Why? Because love and compassion are far more than the abstractions many of us believe them to be. They are real. They are concrete. And they make up the very fabric of the spiritual realm.

“One of the biggest mistakes people make when they think about God is to imagine God as impersonal. Yes, God is behind the numbers, the perfection of the universe that science measures and struggles to understand. But—again, paradoxically—Om is ‘human’ as well—even more human than you and I are. Om understands and sympathizes with our human situation more profoundly and personally than we can even imagine because Om knows what we have forgotten, and understands the terrible burden it is to live with amnesia of the Divine for even a moment.

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

The anonymous gospel attributed to the apostle John begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (Jn. 1:1, 14)

Eben Alexander's NDE - 4

“During my time out of my body, I accomplished this back-and-forth movement from the muddy darkness of the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View to the green brilliance of the Gateway and into the black but holy darkness of the Core any number of times. But each time I reached the Core, I went deeper than before, and was taught more, in the wordless, more-than-verbal way that things are communicated in the worlds above.

“Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything. Not some abstract, hard-to-fathom kind of love but the day-to-day kind that everyone knows—the kind we feel when we look at our spouse and our children, or even our animals. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous or selfish, but unconditional. This is the reality of realities . . . the glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions.

“The primary hurdle that most NDE subjects must jump is . . . how to convey what the love they experienced out there actually feels like.

“We can only see what our brain’s filter allows through. The brain—in particular its left-side linguistic/logical part, that which generates our sense of rationality and the feeling of being a sharply defined ego or self—is a barrier to our higher knowledge and experience.

“We need to recover more of that larger knowledge while living here on earth, while our brains (including its left-side analytical parts) are fully functioning. Science—the science to which I’ve devoted so much of my life—doesn’t contradict what I learned up there. But far, far too many people believe it does, because certain members of the scientific community, who are pledged to the materialist worldview, have insisted again and again that science and spirituality cannot coexist.

“The unconditional love and acceptance that I experienced on my journey is the single most important discovery I have ever made, or will ever make, and as hard as I know it’s going to be to unpack the other lessons I learned while there, I also know in my heart that sharing this very basic message—one so simple that most children readily accept it—is the most important task I have.

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

Eben Alexander's NDE - 3

“I was in a place of clouds where flocks of transparent orbs flew and produced a huge and booming sound like a glorious chant. Seeing and hearing were not separate in this pace. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way.

“Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.

“I continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. An orb that was living and almost solid, as the songs of the angel beings had been.

“My situation was, strangely enough, something akin to that of a fetus in a womb. The fetus floats in the womb with the silent partner of the placenta, which nourishes it and mediates its relationship to the everywhere present yet at the same time invisible mother. In this case, the ‘mother’ was God, the Creator, the Source who is responsible for making the universe and all in it. This Being was so close there seemed to be no distance at all between God and myself. Yet at the same time, I could sense the infinite vastness of the Creator, could see how completely minuscule I was by comparison. I will occasionally use Om as the pronoun for God because I used that name in my notes after my coma. ‘Om’ was the sound I remembered hearing associated with that omniscient, omnipotent, and unconditionally loving God, but any descriptive word falls short.

“Through the Orb, Om told me there is not one universe but many—in fact, more than I could conceive—but that love lay at the center of them all. Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts. Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be.

“I saw the abundance of life through the countless universes, including some whose intelligence was advanced far beyond that of humanity. I saw that there are countless higher dimensions, but that the only way to know these dimensions is to enter and experience them directly. They cannot be known, or understood, from lower dimensional space. Cause and effect exist in these higher realms, but outside of our earthly conception of them. The world of time and space in which we move in this terrestrial realm is tightly and intricately meshed within these higher worlds. In other words, these worlds aren’t totally apart from us, because all worlds are part of the same overarching divine Reality. From those higher worlds one could access any time or place in our world.

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

Compare the apostle Paul’s transcending experience: “I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” (2 Cor. 12:2-4) As an educated Jew, Paul knew of the tradition in Jewish mysticism of seven levels of heavens. (Note in the NRSV, The Oxford Annotated Bible.)

Eben Alexander's NDE - 2

“Below me there was a countryside. It was green, lush, and earthlike. It was earth . . . but at the same time it wasn’t. It was like when your parents take you back to a place where you spent some years as a very young child. You don’t know the place. Or at least you think you don’t. But as you look around, something pulls at you, and you realize that a part of yourself—a part way, deep down—does remember the place after all, and is rejoicing at being back there again.

“I was flying, passing over trees and fields, streams and waterfalls, and here and there, people. They wore simple yet beautiful clothes, and it seemed to me that the colors of these clothes had the same kind of living warmth as the trees and the flowers that bloomed and blossomed in the countryside around them. A beautiful, incredible dream world . . . except it wasn’t a dream. Though I didn’t know where I was or even what I was, I was absolutely sure of one thing: this place I’d suddenly found myself in was completely real.

“But at some point, I realized that I wasn’t alone up there. Someone was next to me: a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes. She was wearing the same kind of peasant-like clothes that the people in the village down below wore. Golden-brown tresses framed her lovely face. We were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, alive with indescribable and vivid colors—the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the greenery and coming back up around us again.

“Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.

“The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.

We will show you many things here, the girl said—again without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. But eventually, you will go back.

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

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).

Process philosophers: Life after death?

Philosopher Robert McDermott asserts that process thought regards life after death and other paranormal experiencing as completely natural phenomena: “Besides expanding William James’s radical empiricism, with its acceptance of nonsensory perception, Whitehead also developed an ontology that explains the possibility of not only extrasensory perception, but also psychokinesis and evidence for life after death.”

McDermott clarifies that Whitehead “did not believe life after death to be actual.” Nonetheless, Whitehead “acknowledged its possibility because psyche is potentially free to exist and perceive apart from its physical body.”

Robert McDermott, “David Ray Griffin on Steiner and Whitehead, Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science (Anoka: MN, Process Century Press, 2020).

David Ray Griffin argues that Whitehead’s panentheism offers two reasons for concluding the universe is meaningful. “On the one hand,” given the primordial nature of God, “our world reflects a divine purpose. On the other hand, every value that is achieved is then preserved everlastingly in God’s receptive side, called the ‘consequent nature of God.’” This means, Griffin explains, that: “Whitehead’s rejection of the materialist identification of the mind with the brain allows life after death to be affirmed, if it is supported by trustworthy evidence.”

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 345-51, in Griffin, “Whitehead’s Naturalism and a Non-Darwinian View of Evolution,” in John B. Cobb, J., Back to Darwin: A Richer Account of Evolution (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 389-390.