Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, has published a book “Proof of Heaven” that purports to show his personal view of the afterlife. Alexander says that he was a skeptic until he fell into a coma in 2008 with meningitis. He then claims to have experienced consciousness after death. He describes how he found himself greeted by a beautiful blue-eyed woman in a “place of clouds, big fluffy pink-white ones” and “shimmering beings.” He then came out of the coma . . . and eventually wrote a book.
Alexander insists that it was only later that he considered the beings that he saw might be angels but such “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.” He also describes a “huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. the sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet.”
What is most striking about this account is the acceptance of the memory as real as opposed to his own generated images during his coma. The fact that the images are so stereotypical would seem to raise this possibility. Experts like Dr. Bruce Greyson have found that electrical stimulation of angular gyrus in the brain creates the same (though not necessary all) of the visions described in out of body or near death experiences including a light in the distance and even out of body visions. The suggestion is that these images are the result of the brain misfiring under stress.
Likewise, Swiss researchers were able to trigger (through electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe) a patient seeing herself lying in bed from from above and experience a sense of floating near the ceiling. Of course, the ability to reproduce such sensations does not conclusively disprove accounts like Alexander’s book.
Alexander gave his account on this PBS “Wormhole” segment where he describes the realization that he was a spot on a butterfly wing in his out of body experience:
What do you think about these accounts?
Source: Telegraph
Here I thought, him being a neurosurgeon and all, that his book was going to be about his neuroscientific discoveries during his treatment of patients who died. Got my hopes all up that there was some really fascinating stuff about to be released in this book, regardless of whether it was foolishness, religion, neuroscience, or “none of the above.”
What he FELT? Oh…that’s interesting.
Those shimmering beings are also interesting. Who was the blue-eyed chick; was she a virgin? After I die, will I be able to get a brown-eyed handsome man instead?
lottakatz 1, October 11, 2012 at 10:53 am
It would be interesting to know how high his temperature was and the drugs he had in his system when his visions took place. I have it on good authority that high fevers as well as pharmaceuticals can produce profound, multi-layered out of body experiences and visions of the workings of the cosmos that are texturally indistinguishable from objective reality.
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Yeah, its a lot like being at the republican convention.
nick spinelli 1, October 11, 2012 at 10:30 am
… as I got older I realized I could feel as much as I could see.
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That is how it is with the stop and frisk cops in NYPD too … 😉
It would be interesting to know how high his temperature was and the drugs he had in his system when his visions took place. I have it on good authority that high fevers as well as pharmaceuticals can produce profound, multi-layered out of body experiences and visions of the workings of the cosmos that are texturally indistinguishable from objective reality.
I don’t care if this guy is sincere, but I always wonder about the people who claim that they have made contact with the afterlife or with people who have passed on. I wonder why they don’t ask the people what God is like and why they don’t see God?
I know for a fact that Dr. Alexander is a making things up because the last time I dropped by on my way back from Golob, the clouds were blue and the gretters were all black-haired Asians.
James in LA, I’m a big believer in energy, I can sense energy in people. For a long time I thought it was just my reading people’s body language. But, as I got older I realized I could feel as much as I could see.
Wow…His God lacks immagination!
We’re already in heaven. We fail to acknowledge it. Evolution is life everlasting, going on to support beings of energy and light that float in space, tethered here and there by bits of gravity-clouds, strumming our MP3 harps, while flying through the air.
I think we expected heaven to be more classy is all. We never anticipated angels would be frisked and felt up at the pearly gates, for one.
Belief is not required for the universe to function.
Magginkat, I didn’t bring it up, Mr. Turley did. He asked about our thoughts on the subject. It’s what this post is about. Geez!
Sounds like it bothers you a lot nick spinelli & you just brought it up!
With that said, what kind of god would want all the crazies we see with him/her/it for an eternity? AND all those different religions fighting among themselves? Religion is the greatest hoax ever pulled on humans.
I’m going to go with science.
“An afterlife” can have several permutations without getting into the heaven thing. Like when one first gets divorced, or gets released from grade school at four pm, or when one gets home from Nam in sort of one piece.
I read this piece a couple days ago on The Daily Beast. The visceral comments, and there were many, were enlightening. I was a professional skeptic for decades. This guy is selling a book. That doesn’t mean he’s a fraud, but that needs to be considered. My take is he’s sincere. However, believing in an afterlife, I need to factor in that bias. Never would I try to convince anyone of an afterlife if they don’t believe it. And I think that if I were an atheist it would bug me if someone did. But, for some reason that I don’t understand, when an athesit ridicules my belief[I never bring it up, I’m talking when I’m asked], it doesn’t bother me.
@Joeseph Piazza Disbelievers aren’t doing so as an affront to your ideal Utopia; we’re the ones that like to find out why and how things work, so we crave a little more substance than ‘what-if’ scenarios.
We’re not necessarily exerting exorbitant effort to shoot him down just because we can, it’s just that his thesis is flaky (at best), and a downright con (at worst). We have a lot of scientific evidence to the contrary, and it’s clearly the stronger theory as to what happened to this individual than his recollection.
How does he explain experiencing consciousness after death if he didn’t die?
Is there an advantage to us making such an effort to disprove a heaven or a postmortem consciousness? What if the Spirit/ the Soul is real, and our collective energy that comes from our Souls is God? What is the downside of this existing? What is the downside of us believing it exists?
Rcampbell,
Things happen in many different ways and peace and happiness is what we seek….. Hopefully it will be there….. We certainly know how to create hell…… Right here…..
What, no souvenir tee shirt?
You Id what you Id.