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
Bob Esq.,
Interpretation is everything.
Gene,
You misunderstand; proving the existence of God would be the end of the world ‘as we know it.’
Triple world score: imagine if the last message from God commanded religious fanatic-terrorists to stop everything they’re doing?
Would pave the way for repealing the Patriot Act; don’t ya think?
lottakatz, Wow! Fascinating indeed, thanks very much. This comports w/ my limited knowledge. I’ve had too many experiences in my life to not believe there is much more than just the temporal. It is always tempered by my being a skeptic and looking for a logical explanation. An incident that occurred when I was bartending once was a real shift in my belief. Most times the logical explanation is more likely. But, more than a few times it was not. I will watch this presentation.
OS… I recall a 60 minutes (or similar show) segment on NDE/out of body experiences, I was younger so it must have been in the later 80’s or 90’s.
In an emergency O.R. (or similar) the doctors had put a digital clock on top of a cabinet after patients had told them they’d had an OBE. After they put the clock up there, they had several patients report seeing the clock and were able to accurately tell the doctors the time on the clock…If I recall correctly they had purposefully set the time on the clock wrong as a control to keep any potential sense of time on the patients part out of play.
Extremely intriguing.
Bob,
The end of the world tends to put a crimp in shopping hours.
I first became aware of the “near death” reports of people a number of years ago. They all bear a striking similarity. Most report going toward a light and there are figures waiting for them to welcome and guide them. The odd thing is that there have been “out of body” experiences by people who reported things they could not have known. One particular instance was a patient who reported looking down from high above his own body, as the medical team tried to revive him. Odd thing was he reported seeing objects on top of a high shelf or cabinet that he would have no way of seeing because they were well above his normal line of sight.
There is much we do not know. People who have had these near death experiences report being changed for the better afterward, and have an entirely different view of dying. As for me, I have had more than one close brushe with death, and once coded when I had a severe allergic reaction and went into cardiac arrest. I never had any experience like this.
Problematic? How so?
Sure, but spending the box office profits would be problematic, Bob.
So Gene,
What you’re talking about is inter-subjective verification of a vision; a vision shared by at least two people as coordinated by the unconscious.
“What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Proving the existence of God and ending the world as we know it; wouldn’t that be a hit at the box office?
The ‘fullest’ part of my experience, where I was completely under the full effect, was approximately 4 hours. It felt like a full day or more… In the following months, my time perception was different, time seemed to move slower than before.
I also experienced time as a steadier phenomenon… Whereas “time flies when having fun” didn’t hold as true for me as it had before. Boring repeated tasks didn’t drone on and on as they had before, and fun experiences that previously flown by in a blur was perceived to unfold in a more ‘normal’ fashion and less of a blur. Unfortunately, that has worn off mostly and work drones on and fun flies by as it did before…but I do have a different understanding of time and how I perceive it. I understand that time is concrete (basically) and that it is my perception of time that speeds up or slows down.
Nick, You might be interested in the below excerpt from a Discovery channel series “Through The Wormhole” from 2011. It’s fascinating.
This excerpt is US region but the entire episode is available on YouTube in four parts with Spanish subs. Part 1 is up and 2-4 are listed in the right-hand queue/column. They are at (remove the “dot” and replace with a period/close up):
http://www dot youtube.com/watch?v=CDM3jennQec
——-
excerpt:
Through The Wormhole: Is There A Sixth Sense?
2-5 “Is There a Sixth Sense?” 6 July 2011 (2011-07-06)
Can we perceive objects and events beyond the world detected by our five senses? The true limits of our human brain remain a scientific mystery. New studies in neuroscience are showing that our minds can really detect events and objects that our conscious selves know nothing about. Can we predict events in the future? Is there such a thing as a global consciousness? Could physical laws on the cusp of being discovered be at the root of all this?
Candy P, no, this guy says the opposite: “It’s all real, so keep your clothes on!”
I heard of some professor stripping off all of his clothes and exclaiming that “none of its real” could this be the the same guy?
JCTheBigTree, Mescaline was my entree. I didn’t have any real spiritual revelations but it gave me a pretty profound, dare I say “heavy,” concept of time.
“I wonder why they don’t ask the people what God is like and why they don’t see God?”
Read Dr. Alexander’s description, I read it yesterday and if I recall, he basically says that he experienced total darkness and absolute light at the same time and ‘realized’ that that light was God or something similar to that.
” I love that science is exploratory but wants to deny real experience. The term real is relative, of course, but if it’s real to the person experiencing it, then it’s real.”
Science doesn’t deny experience but rather demands objective verifiable proof not dependent upon individual perception. Not all experiences are real as evidenced by perceptual misunderstandings like optical illusions and totally fabricated perceptions like hallucinations. There is a difference between perceived reality and objective reality and they are not equivalences in science.
Elaine…according to the story the Dr’s neocortext was shutdown during his 7 day coma. This, apparently, indicates that any conciousness had to be shut down as the neocortex is where science understands conciousness to come from.
The description sounds exactly like someone who’s describing a trip on DMT; the most powerful known entheogen that happens to be produced by amost every living being, flora and fauna. I have read that DMT floods the brain at the time of passing. If this is true, then my assumption is that DMT floods the neurons and is responsible for any post-mortum perceptions/realities. When people have a NDE the brain gets flooded prematurely, the individual starts to experience that reality, and is brought back to the reality we all know having had a glimpse of what happens after life.
I have a vague belief that our experience of heaven/hell/purgatory/72 virgins/myriad other human descriptions of the afterlife is simply the result of whether or not we have a good ‘trip’. If this is true, then I believe an individual’s emotional state is the determining factor of whether we go to a heaven/hell. If an individual truly believes they have been good they’ll have a good trip, if they’ve been a terrible person their actions will come back to haunt them in a bad trip… Maybe a war vet will have to relive and be able to purge those bad memories and move on to a good trip. (entheogens are being tested for PTSD and this falls into a similar vein)
Personally, I believe that if he truly had this experience (and is not using a story to sell a book) then his perception is complete reality simply because perception is ultimately how we decide what is reality.
My own experience with entheogens provided me a glimpse of this sort of ‘reality’ and the impact it can have upon an individual. I had grown up Christian completely believing the story, in college/grad school I lost that belief and purported atheism. I tried ‘magic mushrooms’ and my experience was extremely cathartic. I lost several long and deeply held anxieties, simply by ‘realizing’ they didn’t truly exist. I became immediately aware of an interconnectedness and the certain energy that is part of that. I won’t drone on an on like your stoner roommate in college, but I will say that it was a very profound experience that was as real as anything else. 5 years later I still benefit from that experience, the loss of those anxieties, and a greater sense of calm spirituality (sans the dogma of religion). Hard to explain without experiencing it.
Why are we so intent on believing that this is the only experience we can have here in this physical realm? I love that science is exploratory but wants to deny real experience. The term real is relative, of course, but if it’s real to the person experiencing it, then it’s real.
rafflaw:
people dont have a conception of God. God is the ultimate abstraction, nothing concrete. There is no sensual experience of God, we do not see, smell, touch, taste God. Only some of us have “heard” Him speak to us.
Since humans interact with the world through our senses it would seem to make sense. But your question is strange in that you would think people could visualize God based on all of the information we have been told about Him. We can visualize a cherry red GTO with green snakes painted to the sides.
Your question is very interesting. Has anyone ever seen God in a near death experience, I have heard of people seeing Jesus.
Is the bright light God? if so why a bright light and not something else?
A neurosurgeon writing about a “real life after death” experience? The skeptic in me says its all about royalties.