Pleaase note all ye doubters!
Dr. Eben Alexander studied and taught at Harvard and has a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. He calls himself a Christian, although he never held deeply religious views or faith in the afterlife. He claims he understood what happens to the brain when people are near death and believed there were scientific explanations for heavenly out-of-body journeys revealed by those who had near death experiences. That all changed in 2008 after he fell into a coma for seven days after contracting meningitis. Dr. Eben Alexander said he woke up one morning four years ago with an “extremely intense headache”. Within hours, his entire cortex, the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and pretty much makes us human, had shut down. Strangely, Eben Alexander had contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis; E. coli bacteria entered his cerebrospinal fluid and were eating his brain. It was unknown if he would live. Then, on the morning of his seventh day in the hospital, his eyes opened as the doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment. While he lay in a coma, he claims to have visited the afterlife and describes his experience in an article published in Newsweek. Dr. Alexander first found himself floating above big, puffy, pink-white clouds. He then viewed “transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer like lines behind them.” He claims he traveled through heaven accompanied by a beautiful blue-eyed woman, surrounded by butterflies. The unknown woman gave him three messages: “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever,” “You have nothing to fear,” and “There is nothing you can do wrong.” Dr. Eben Alexander states “there is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.” “According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent,” Alexander writes in this week’s edition of Newsweek. “But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.” Dr. Alexander was hesitant to share his experience with his colleagues, however he did find comfort from his church community. He tells his story in a book, “Proof of Heaven: A neurosurgeon’s journey into the afterlife.” The book will be published in late October. He also notes that - "The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. QUITE A STATEMENT FROM A TOP FLIGHT NEUROSURGEON.
