# Heaven or hallucination: Near-death experiences



## David Baxter PhD (Oct 11, 2012)

*Heaven or hallucination: Are near-death experiences proof of the afterlife?*
by Wency Leung, _The Globe and Mail_
Thursday, Oct. 11 2012

Eben Alexander is convinced heaven exists. Although he had long been  skeptical of other people’s near-death experiences, the Harvard  neurosurgeon became a believer in the afterlife when he had his own  brush with death.

In an essay published this week in _Newsweek_,  Alexander describes how he fell into a seven-day coma in 2008 after  contracting a rare form of bacterial meningitis. Although his  higher-order brain functions totally shut down, he recalls that his  inner self remained conscious.

  “It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not  just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma,  but – more importantly – the things that happened during that time,” he  wrote. “Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of  clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the  deep blue-black sky.”

He then recalls seeing flocks of creatures  that looked like birds or angels and hearing “a sound, huge and booming  like a glorious chant.”

Even stranger, he says, he was accompanied  by a young woman who communicated to him without using words: “You are  loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

Alexander admits all this may sound hokey, but he notes that the cortex of his brain was completely shut down during this time.

“All  the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these  experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial  malfunctioning of the cortex,” he wrote. “My near-death experience,  however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it  was simply off.”

Similarly, in a book published earlier this year, _To Heaven and Back_,  orthopedic surgeon Mary Neal writes about her own account of being  transformed from a cynic to believer after an out-of-body experience  while nearly drowning during a kayaking trip. In an interview with _Today_, she recalled a sense of being comforted and reassured and seeing a group of spirits that had come to greet her.

As Scientific American previously reported,  science can explain many aspects of near-death experiences as mere  glitches of normal brain function. The commonly described light at the  end of the tunnel, for instance, can occur due to a decrease in oxygen  and blood flow to the eye. A number of drugs can produce the sense of  euphoria that those who have had near-death experiences describe.

Scientific  American noted that around three per cent of Americans say they have  had a near-death experience, and such experiences are reported across  cultures.


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## David Baxter PhD (Oct 11, 2012)

*Heaven Is Real: A Doctor?s Experience With the Afterlife*

*Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife*
by Dr. Eben Alexander
October 8, 2012 

_When a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife. _

As  a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death  experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon.  I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon,  teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. I understand  what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always  believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly  out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

The  brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate  mechanism. Reduce the amount of oxygen it receives by the smallest  amount and it will react. It was no big surprise that people who had  undergone severe trauma would return from their experiences with strange  stories. But that didn’t mean they had journeyed anywhere real.

Although  I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in  actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus  was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the  world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there  was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I  envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided.  But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.

In  the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the  human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced  something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in  consciousness after death.

I  know how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my  story with the logic and language of the scientist I am.

Very  early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense  headache. Within hours, my entire cortex—the part of the brain that  controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut  down. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital  where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow  contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks  newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and  were eating my brain.

When  I entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in  anything beyond a vegetative state were already low. They soon sank to  near nonexistent. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body  unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.

Then,  on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed  whether to discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open.

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.

But  that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless  subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there.  It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite  literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains  and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a  chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

I’m  not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness  exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as  old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever  traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut  down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as  mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

All  the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these  experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial  malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took  place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply  off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and  from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and  neurological examinations. 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.

It  took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the  medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more  importantly—the things that happened during that time. Toward the  beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy,  pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.

Higher  than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering  beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind  them.

Birds?  Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my  recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings  themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known  on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.

A  sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above,  and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking  about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as  they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise—that if the  joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not  otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost  material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you  wet.

Seeing  and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. 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. Again, from my present perspective, I would suggest  that you couldn’t look at anything in that world at all, for the word  “at” itself implies a separation that did not exist there. Everything  was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like  the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet ... or a  butterfly’s wing.

It  gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A  woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete  detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses  framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along  together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I  recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies  were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the  woods and coming back up around us again. It was a river of life and  color, moving through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a  peasant’s, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel  orange-peach—had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that  everything else had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it  for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth  living, no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic  look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow  beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have  down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other  kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger  than all of them.

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.”

The  message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was  like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life  without ever fully understanding it.

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

To this, I had only one question.

Back where?

A  warm wind blew through, like the kind that spring up on the most  perfect summer days, tossing the leaves of the trees and flowing past  like heavenly water. A divine breeze. It changed everything, shifting  the world around me into an even higher octave, a higher vibration.

Although  I still had little language function, at least as we think of it on  earth, I began wordlessly putting questions to this wind, and to the  divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it.

Where is this place?

Who am I?

Why am I here?

Each  time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came  instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew  through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts  was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them.  They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. 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. The  orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this vast presence  surrounding me. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and  the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the orb (which I  sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to, the woman on  the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it.

 Later,  when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet  Henry Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this  vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself.

_“There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”_
​
 That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.

 I  know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this  sounds. Had someone—even a doctor—told me a story like this in the old  days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of  some delusion. 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.

 What happened to me demands explanation.

 Modern  physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided.  Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics  tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the  universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There  is no true separation.

 Before  my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities.  Not only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined  by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to  see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus  were speaking of in their (very) different ways.

 I’ve  spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical  institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I  myself did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex,  generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any  kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God  and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies  broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to  spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness  and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical  brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at  large.

 I  don’t expect this to be an easy task, for the reasons I described  above. When the castle of an old scientific theory begins to show fault  lines, no one wants to pay attention at first. The old castle simply  took too much work to build in the first place, and if it falls, an  entirely new one will have to be constructed in its place.

 I  learned this firsthand after I was well enough to get back out into the  world and talk to others—people, that is, other than my long-suffering  wife, Holley, and our two sons—about what had happened to me. The looks  of polite disbelief, especially among my medical friends, soon made me  realize what a task I would have getting people to understand the  enormity of what I had seen and experienced that week while my brain was  down.

 One  of the few places I didn’t have trouble getting my story across was a  place I’d seen fairly little of before my experience: church. The first  time I entered a church after my coma, I saw everything with fresh eyes.  The colors of the stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of  the landscapes I’d seen in the world above. The deep bass notes of the  organ reminded me of how thoughts and emotions in that world are like  waves that move through you. And, most important, a painting of Jesus  breaking bread with his disciples evoked the message that lay at the  very heart of my journey: that we are loved and accepted unconditionally  by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I’d  learned of as a child in Sunday school.

 Today  many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost  their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before  my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.

 But  I now understand that such a view is far too simple. 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. In its place  a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging  already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will  value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued  above all: truth.

   This  new picture of reality will take a long time to put together. It won’t  be finished in my time, or even, I suspect, my sons’ either. In fact,  reality is too vast, too complex, and too irreducibly mysterious for a  full picture of it ever to be absolutely complete. But in essence, it  will show the universe as evolving, multi-dimensional, and known down to  its every last atom by a God who cares for us even more deeply and  fiercely than any parent ever loved their child.

 I’m  still a doctor, and still a man of science every bit as much as I was  before I had my experience. But on a deep level I’m very different from  the person I was before, because I’ve caught a glimpse of this emerging  picture of reality. And you can believe me when I tell you that it will  be worth every bit of the work it will take us, and those who come after  us, to get it right.


Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, M.D.  Simon & Schuster, Inc.


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## W00BY (Oct 11, 2012)

this stuff absolutely fascinates me

not just the theories on the effects of hypoxia etc on the brain and the illusions it will induce but also our understanding of coma patients.

My father-in-law collapsed of cardiac arrest and was in a coma for a week before he died, we where told he was effectively brain dead, yet, I was positive he could not only hear me but was trying to communicate with me.

Articles like the one above throw wide open a discussion not many people want to have, they either believe or don't and neither side wants to think there may be something else or that we can return from certain states mentally and physically, fascinating stuff!


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## michavalos (Nov 22, 2012)

I would love to know the answer by myself, but it seems it is so risky, near death experience means you need to risk your life to taste death and I am afraid that it would really result to death and disaster. I can hear and read many things about this, somehow it made me think and decide, I will believe to this one, but I still want to know the answer by myself.
To dream for me is something closer to near death experience.


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## Darkside (Dec 25, 2012)

If I could thank you twice I would. 

Wow ... just WOW!

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W00BY said:


> this stuff absolutely fascinates me
> 
> not just the theories on the effects of hypoxia etc on the brain and the illusions it will induce but also our understanding of coma patients.
> 
> ...



This is interesting. If he is right then my father, who suffered a concussion and brain swelling leading to unconsciousness, was probably aware of my mother and myself in his room the afternoon he died. He lived for 4 days after his fall and slowly stopped breathing. I had always assumed that because his physical brain was not working that he was unaware, but that might all be wrong.

I've often wondered about what people who are dying sense ... and the ones who do die obviously can't tell us. But these stories seem to say they are aware but in a different way.

But there is a conflict between what Christianity teaches us and what these stories tell. I just wonder how much of it the church has wrong.


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## Mari (Dec 29, 2012)

Insomnia night so I thought I would write about my experience although it is very difficult to put into words and it happened many years ago. 

  I was very ill although I was not in a coma I was feverish and delirious.

  The first thing I remember is being outside my body and moving toward a brilliant bright light. Around me was darkness but filled with with beings that seemed to be made of light and they were reaching out to me. I recognized one as being my grandmother and she spoke to me more than the others, not in words but with thoughts/feelings. I felt her love and caring but when she tried to embrace me it was as if the other beings pulled her away and they all sent the same message, almost like a chorus of music. 

  The message was that it was not my time and that I must go back to my body ? that I was still needed on earth and as painful as it might be I had to return to my body and fight to survive. I did not want to leave because it was so beautiful and peaceful and I was being pulled toward the light. I was told that I had to resist the pull of the light and fight for my survival on earth. The message also was that one day I would return and would be welcomed with love but now was not the time. I returned to my body which was not at all pleasant because I was ill for many more days. I did have to fight very hard to survive especially realizing that I could just leave my body and go to such a heavenly place. 

  That is a very brief description of my experience and maybe sometime I will write more completely but it is something that is difficult to put into words. It was like all the most beautiful artwork and music in the world together filled with beings that could be described as angels. I do not know if they had wings but they floated and moved nowhere and everywhere and their voices were like echoes on the wind. This happened to me before I had heard of near-death experience and even since then I have not read a lot about such experiences. I believe it was real and not a dream but you can read it however you choose.


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## Banned (Dec 29, 2012)

I've long been interested in NDEs and I've heard both sides of the argument - it's a biological process that occurs as the body and brain shut down and it's a religious experience of an encounter with the other side.  I'm not super religious anymore but I do believe enough to believe in the afterlife and I do believe that some people are fortunate enough to have these experiences.  All I can say for me is that I hope when I go its as beautiful for me as what's been described by so many who've had these experiences.


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## Timber (Dec 30, 2012)

I found an interesting article about something that may someday help us out on this topic. The article is about using brain imaging like a movie to see inside of a coma patient and what they see. 

Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind

I would love to see them accomplish this! Forget your dreams? Just watch them in the morning! I can't imagine how this may help the world of psychiatry as well! Instead of an individual trying to recall a dream, in which the recall may contain inaccuracies, the patient can show the therapist exactly what was seen. 

 Anyway, back on track, I found another interesting article that about  "so-called blindsight, the native ability to sense things using the  brain?s primitive, subcortical  ? and entirely subconscious  ? visual  system." Could what they have discovered in the study link to near death experiences? Check it out 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html


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