Dr. Laurin Bellg writes: “I am a critical care physician working with very ill patients in the ICU. My training prepared me to help care for the very sick, but it did not prepare me for encounters with the unknown. Over the past twenty years I've heard numerous mysterious and beautiful stories that patients have returned from the brink of death to share with me. They are both incredible and life affirming. “I don’t think at this point in human evolution we have the scientific theory, language, or methodology to untangle and understand consciousness phenomena.” Until we can, she urges that we hold these experiences “in curious regard, rather than dismissing them as preposterous impossibilities,” as this attitude “will better facilitate both an eventual understanding of these events and a supportive relationship with those who have them.”

“Helen had been in a very bad car accident,” Dr. Billg reports. “She didn’t remember the actual impact that crumpled four vehicles at an intersection. What she did remember, however, was shortly after the crash getting out of her car in somewhat of a panic, with the intention of surveying the damage and making sure everyone was all right. She knew how many vehicles were involved—there were four—and that one was a gray floral-delivery van with company decals on the side, composed of blue writing superimposed on a spray of red roses. That was correct.

“She described walking over to a dark-green, four-door sedan that was smashed against her hood at a sharp angle where it had hit her from the left side after running a stop sign. She described the dark-haired man with a beard, slumping over the steering wheel, moaning. She correctly concluded that the impact of the two vehicles—her car and the bearded man’s—had been the initial catalyst that had created a pileup when the delivery van that was behind her and the white SUV behind it couldn’t stop in time. She noted that the van had slammed into the back of her car, causing it to be wedged like an accordion between the green vehicle and the van. This left her pinned in and unable to move—physically, that is.

“The white SUV merely rear-ended the delivery van behind Helen, and the woman driving seemed none the worse for wear. Helen pointed out that it was this driver she had heard making the call on her cell phone to emergency services, as clearly as if she were right beside her. This was also correct. The driver of the least damaged vehicle, the white SUV, had indeed made the initial call for help.

“Helen was unresponsive and trapped in her car, according to the paperwork. Her consciousness, however, seemed to have surveyed the scene and remembered it accurately from a vantage point not just outside of her vehicle, but also actually outside of her physical body itself, which was still trapped in the car. She knew the driver of the delivery van was relatively unharmed but unable to open his door, which was rendered unusable by the impact.

“She also knew that after placing the 911 call, the driver of the white SUV was rushing frantically from vehicle to vehicle to survey the damage. She saw her reach into the green sedan, weaving her arm underneath the injured driver, to turn off the engine that was starting to generate billowing smoke from underneath the wrinkled hood. Hearing him groan, she then leaned in to comfort him, rubbing his back in a soothing gesture. Helen heard the lady trying to reassure him that he would be okay and help was on its way.

“She also saw the woman in the passenger’s seat beside the bearded man, crying, obviously upset. Seeing that the owner of the white SUV was focused on the driver, Ellen walked over to the passenger side of the car and tried to offer comfort and support to the crying woman through the shattered window, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t seem to notice her.

“It was then that Helen heard the wailing sirens of approaching police cars and ambulances. She took that as a cue to get back to her own vehicle so that they could all be properly cared for. Walking back to her own car, a sudden realization stopped her in her tracks—she was looking at a woman, apparently unresponsive, in the driver seat of her car and realized that she was that woman.

“She was standing outside of her own car, looking at what appeared to be her body trapped in the driver seat of a very damaged vehicle. It took her awhile to orient to the fact that she was looking at her own body while somehow being separated from it. In doing so, she eventually came to the sobering conclusion that if she was outside of her body looking at herself trapped in the heap of mangled metal, she must be dead.

“The official police report indicated that Helen was quite entangled in the debris of her car, and that it took nearly thirty minutes to extricate her. It was unclear at that time exactly what was injured or broken, but soon enough, the odd angles of her ankles revealed the truth of her injuries and that information was called into the hospital ahead of her arrival. Not only was she trapped in the rubble of the car, both of her ankles were clearly broken and she was observed by experienced rescue workers to be unconscious at the scene. There is no physical way that she would have been able to get out of her vehicle, let alone walk around and report was such great accuracy what she later described.”

Laurin Billg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them (Sloan Press, 2016), 177-181. Dr. Billg is a Critical Care Medicine Specialist in Appleton, WI and has over 24 years of experience in the medical field.

Bernie Siegal 's experience of God and the dead

For surgeon Bernie Siegel, “the knowledge that God is a loving, intelligent, and conscious energy” has come from dreams, drawings, and near-death experiences. He believes that: “first, there was consciousness and consciousness was with God” and “consciousness was God, because God speaks in dreams and images―the universal language.” From his experience with patients, Siegel has learned that consciousness can be healing. To a cancer patient Siegel proposed: “visualizing God’s light melting a tumor that appears as a block of ice.” To another: “Let go and let God.” Siegel tells his patients: “By accepting ourselves as God’s creation, seeing beauty and meaning in what we are, just as we are, we accept others as God’s creation too.”

Near-death experiences have led some to see the afterlife as offering reincarnation in this or another world. “I have had a near-death experience,” Siegel confirms, “and, through this, learned that we are more than our bodies. I have had past-life experiences and had messages from dead patients delivered to me through mediums. I have even heard the voices of the dead speak to me.” Instead of denying the reality of these anomalous experiences, Siegel affirms that consciousness, “as a universal field,” is “the source of all creation” and “communicates with our consciousness.”

Bernie S. Siegel, The Art of Healing: Uncovering Your Inner Wisdom and Potential for Self-Healing (New World Library, 2013), 198, 42, 36, 163, 92, 4-5, and 114.

Eben Alexander's NDE - 7

“‘I was blind, but now I see,’ took on a new meaning as I understood just how blind to the full nature of the spiritual universe we are on earth—especially people like I had been, who had believed that matter was the core reality, and that all else—thought, consciousness, ideas, emotions, spirit—were simply productions of it. This revelation inspired me greatly, because it allowed me to see the staggering heights of communion and understanding that lie ahead for us all, when each of us leaves the limitations of our physical body and brain behind.

“Humor. Irony. Pathos. I had always thought these were qualities we humans developed to cope with this so often painful and unfair world. And they are. But in addition to being consolations, these qualities are recognitions—brief, flashing, but all-important—of the fact that whatever our struggles and sufferings in the present world are, they can’t truly touch the larger eternal beings we in truth are.

“Another aspect of the good news is that you don’t have to almost die to glimpse behind the veil—but you must do the work. Learning about that realm from books and presentations is a start—but at the end of the day, we each have to go deep into our own consciousness, through prayer or meditation, to access these truths.

“I never heard Om’s voice directly, nor saw Om’s face. It was as if Om spoke to me through thoughts that were like wave-walls rolling through me, rocking everything around me and showing that there is a deeper fabric of existence—a fabric that all of us are always part of, but which we’re generally not conscious of.

“So I was communicating directly with God? Absolutely. Expressed that way, it sounds grandiose. But when it was happening, it didn’t feel that way. Instead, I felt like I was doing what every soul is able to do when they leave their bodies, and what we can all do right now through various methods of prayer or deep meditation. Communicating with God is the most extraordinary experience imaginable, yet at the same time it’s the most natural one of all, because God is present in us at all times. Omniscient, omnipotent, personal—and loving us without conditions. We are connected as One through our divine link.”

 

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

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.)