This is a follow up posting on Dr. Eben Alexander's book on his
remarkable Near Death experience. This interview is long and I will
underline key passages. As I have stated before, I entered this
state personally while resting one afternoon and was able to confirm
the reality of the state itself. I reached a couple of conclusions
then and this interview will generate additional information.
1 The experience does not have the softness or intangibility of a
normal dream state. The luminous dreaming phrase is appropriate.
What is observed is an expansion of the spectrum. This is pretty
specific and not something we can experience or even expect.
2 Imagined abodes and attire are possible for a soul residing in the
afterlife and that afterlife becomes experientially real. I observed
my mother in her abode but did not communicate.
3 It is possible to acquire new information. It is also possible for
an entity in this environment to monitor events on earth if it
wishes. One gets the sense of been above it all but having interest
as we would expect. I do not think such an abode is the end of the
story.
That is as far as I got on this and as far as was suggested by most
other observers. This article reveals a great deal more and is a
breakthrough in understanding. The animal kingdom is richer than we
ever thought.
Dr. Eben Alexander
on the Medical Mystery of Near-Death Experience
October 23rd, 2012
Alex Tsakiris
Interview with Dr.
Eben Alexander about his new book, Proof of Heaven, and the
medical mystery of his NDE.
Join Skeptiko host
Alex Tsakiris for an interview with neurosurgeon and author Dr. Eben
Alexander about his new book, Proof of Heaven. During the
interview Alexander explains why his medical training did not prepare
him for understanding his near-death experience:
Alex Tsakiris:
One of the really fascinating parts of the book is the professional
transformation you go through as a result of this experience.
As you tell it, you weren’t totally unaware of the near-death
experience research. It was out there. You had heard of,
for example, Dr. Raymond Moody, but it was something you
looked past because all your training had told you this was
impossible. So, it had created this blind spot in
your medical knowledge.
Dr. Eben
Alexander: …it did require a tremendous amount of
re-education. Having been an academic neurosurgeon for over 20 years,
I thought I understood brain and how brain generates consciousness
and mind and soul, spirit, what-have-you. But my thinking was
clearly that when the brain and the body die that’s the end of
consciousness. I now know that’s absolutely not true.
And to get to that point after my experience I really had to learn
a tremendous amount about consciousness I never had to know as a
practicing academic neurosurgeon.
I knew a few things
about consciousness. I knew a few things that seem to turn it off.
Every day we use general anesthesia which is effective at turning off
consciousness. Yet having used it for 150 years we still
have absolutely no clue how general anesthesia works. I think that
should give the listener a little bit of an idea of how little we
really understand about consciousness. In fact, my experience
showed me this very clearly, and I go into nine neuroscientific
hypotheses in my book that I entertained and discussed with others in
neuroscience, neurosurgery, trying to explain how my ultra-real
experience might have happened in my brain given the severity of my
meningitis. My conclusion is that none of these
explanations work.
Today we welcome Dr.
Eben Alexander back to Skeptiko. Dr. Alexander has just
published Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Near-Death
Experience and Journey into the Afterlife. Welcome, Dr. Alexander.
Thanks for joining me on Skeptiko.
Dr. Eben Alexander:
Well hello, Alex, and thanks very much for having me back.
Alex Tsakiris:
Well, you’ve written quite a book here. One part medical
thriller—it really is—and one part near-death experience science
book. It’s a great read. I didn’t think neurosurgeons were
supposed to be writers of this caliber.
Dr. Eben
Alexander: Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. I think
you can tell it’s really a story from the heart because it’s a
very personal story and my experience was absolutely life-changing in
every sense of the word. And I mean, to me I think a lot of people
are most interested when they hear that I had a profound near-death
experience like millions of people have had and witnessed that
ultra-reality and the startling nature of that realm.
And because I had
bacterial meningitis, which really pretty much turned off the human
part of my brain, after I was recovering and putting the whole story
together it started becoming very clear to me that there was
absolutely no way that it had happened in my brain. And that was
based on neuroscientific principles. So as stunned as I was by
the nature of the experience, the ultra-reality, when I was waking up
from coma my original intent was to try and explain that based on
neuroscientific principles. T
Then over a few months
and even before I started reading any near-death experience
literature, I realized how sick I was and how it was really
impossible to explain this very rich experience through the typical
neuroscientific explanations and it really happened and it
happened in a place that’s outside of our physical universe.
I think that’s what’s so stunning and that’s why so many people
are fascinated by this story.
Alex Tsakiris:
Absolutely. And of course, as you just mentioned, I think the other
aspect of it that draws people in is your background. I mean, you
would know the answers to some of those questions. You have quite an
extensive academic background as well as professional. I mean, you
are a brain surgeon. You know how people say, “It doesn’t take a
brain surgeon?” Well, in this case it takes a brain surgeon. You
were a professor at Harvard Medical School for 15 years, you’re
publishing papers in all medical journals, so you are a bonafide
expert in these areas.
And then if I can just
fill in a little of your story—so there you are, you’re a
neurosurgeon, you moved back to the South where you’re from
originally with your family to slow down a little bit although you
still have a very active practice and do to this day. But then this
incident, this spinal meningitis, and it’s an e coli bacteria,
which I just was stunned. I didn’t know anything about it but
again, this book is part medical thriller so when you read this
book—and it’s really a great read.
It’s not only a book
you’re going to want to read for yourself but I really think it’s
the kind of book you’re going to want to give to someone else
because they’ll be drawn into the story and at the same time
they’ll be overwhelmed by the medical and scientific evidence
behind it.
Anyway, this thing
happens to you and I guess one of the parts we could explore right
now is as a physician, tell folks a little bit about the medical
miracle of your recovery itself. Taking the NDE out of it this is
just an extraordinary medical case, isn’t it?
Dr. Eben Alexander:
Right. I must say, all the physicians and nurses who took care of
me were absolutely dumbfounded that I ended up making a complete
recovery. As you pointed out a minute ago, it’s very important to
note that it was an e coli—a spontaneous e coli meningitis—which
in adults probably has an incidence of around 1 in 10 million per
year or less. So it’s very rare. That, I think, has mainly served
the purpose of keeping me focused so that I was not about to dismiss
any of this. It’s almost like it was kind of an overkill of forcing
rarity on me so I would not lose track of how important it was to get
to the bottom of all this.
The other thing is, as
I do tell in the book, when I first came down with this illness which
was on November 10, 2008, I became symptomatic at about four in the
morning. It was a very severe, very rapidly progressive disease so
it started with back pain and then rapidly to a severe headache. And
then within about three hours of onset, into a grand mal epileptic
seizure that was really not breakable. And if you do a literature
search you’ll find that if someone has a grand negative bacterial
meningitis like I had and they go into coma rapidly, and in the
literature that’s within 24 hours—of course, I was so sick I did
that within three or four hours.
It turns out that with
that history, when they get to the emergency room their mortality is
already at 90% from that illness. So I had only a 10% chance of
surviving when I got to the emergency room. They quickly put me on
three antibiotics to try and cover this and I did not respond for
several days to the antibiotics. So that 10% survival estimate when I
first came in the door crept towards 2% or 3% by the end of the week,
which is the time when I finally woke up.
My physicians were
making it very clear to my family that even if I did survive it,
especially by that point after I’d been in a coma on a ventilator
for a week, that my chances for neurological recovery were very
limited and that I would probably spend the rest of my life in a
nursing home. So in fact, they were even at the point of discussing
stopping the antibiotics just so they didn’t get caught in that
trap where at the end of the day they might have cured the
meningitis and yet been left with somebody in a persistent vegetative
state. It really was an absolute miracle that I was able to come
back.
[as an aside, my own experience with a
major heart attack stopped my heart for twenty minutes with much the
same prognosis. I was saved because excellent CPR was applied
throughout even though then no one understood that it could work -
arclein]
Alex Tsakiris:
And your coming back is again just stunningly remarkable. Talk a
little bit about that. You do in the book; you describe the process
but it just sounds almost unbelievable that you would recover the way
that you did.
Dr. Eben Alexander:
Well, I will tell you that if I’d had a patient—before my coma if
you had asked me, “How much does a patient remember if they have
acute bacterial meningitis, go into coma within hours, spend a week
on a ventilator, and then finally start to wake back up?”
Alex Tsakiris:
Yeah, but your eyes popped open, right? Your eyes pop open and you
say, “Take this ventilator out.” And you start talking. I mean,
that is also quite amazing, right?
Dr. Eben Alexander:
It was absolutely stunning. I think it’s important to point out to
people that for one thing, I would not expect a patient to remember
anything at all from within that experience. So in fact, I was
very shocked because I remembered a tremendous amount and that’s
what I tell in my story.
[I also remembered nothing during my
induced nine day coma likely because they had me on maximum mophine
from which it took weeks to cleanse my system off. I suspect he had
no morphine - arclein]
The other
thing that’s crucial to understand is that the meningitis was so
effective at wiping out the outer surface of my brain, my neocortex,
that’s the part where all of our human experience happens.
Meningitis is probably the most efficient way to wipe out
the human brain and human existence and still leave some of the
deeper structures intact so that potentially somebody could survive
it, although very, very few people who are as sick as I was with
bacterial meningitis end up surviving at all. So I still consider
myself extremely fortunate.
Alex Tsakiris:
And you remark in the book that this is for those reasons probably
one of the most convincing cases of survival of consciousness because
it’s very difficult to argue from a medical neuroscience standpoint
that there was anything going on in that brain state that you were
in.
Dr. Eben Alexander:
Right. I think my neurologic exams very clearly point out that I
was getting much worse through the week to the point where I really
didn’t need much in the way of sedation or anything. My brain stem
was very damaged, you can tell from my lack of brain stem reflexes. I
mean, I was extremely sick from this.
And of course, when I
started reviewing my medical record much, much later I was shocked
that I could be that sick and then be coming back to the point where
I was reviewing my own medical record. In fact, I was present at
my own Grand Rounds, which are a clinical pathologic correlation
conference which most people obviously cannot ever do because those
conferences are about patients who are deathly ill.
It just shocked me
that the meningitis was so effective that deep inside coma, when I
first became aware of anything deep inside coma, I had absolutely no
memory of my life. No knowledge whatsoever of Earth or humans or this
universe, certainly nothing about my identity or any of that. I
didn’t even have any words. All my words were completely gone.
There was no language at all. And I spent a very long period of time
initially, and of course long is easy to understand when you realize
I had no prior existence. So just like for a newborn, an hour or
two can seem like infinity because it’s their whole lifetime.
[this
is important and sharply confirms internally what is been observed
physically, In my case, I retained awareness of my life - arclein]
And likewise, just
coming into existence in this murky kind of underground, muddy, foamy
realm which is what I initially remembered, it was an area that I
call in my book “an earthworm’s eye view.” It’s a very
murky—I don’t think memory was working at all well and that’s
why it seemed so foamy. I had no body awareness, no sense of self at
all.
I was just aware of
being this speck in this kind of mundane, boiling soup with this
mechanical pounding sound deep off in the distance and kind of a
vague sensation of roots or vessels or something that were coursing
through the muck around me. Occasionally even a memory of some face
that might boil up. I mean, these could be ugly, grotesque shapes.
Certainly nothing identifiable. They’d boil out of the muck and
there might be some screech or roar or something and then they’d go
back into the bubbling soup and that was that.
I felt like I was
in that earthworm eye view, that murky realm, for ages. It’s
impossible to really put a number on it because it was for a very,
very long time. It was the only existence I’d ever known. And it
was in that setting that I had this what to me seems to be kind of a
spontaneous emergence, which is most paradoxical in looking back on
it because it was at a point where that earthworm eye view, that
muck, was at its lowest ebb.
My thinking when I
was writing all this up is that that earthworm eye view was about the
best consciousness that my brain, soaking in pus, could muster.
That’s why it was so stunning that what happened next was
an awareness of this spinning melody of bright light and it had all
these fine filaments coming off of it. It was spinning very slowly in
front of me and coming closer but it had a beautiful melody that went
with it. As it came closer it opened up like a rip in the fabric of
existence and was a portal into this lovely, verdant valley. But I
found I was going into a beautiful realm that was a very rich
tapestry, very experiential.
In recalling all the
memories of it and my awareness of it in the weeks after my coma when
I was trying to write all of this up as a neuroscientist report, the
amazing thing was how a lot of the visual and auditory sensations had
this complete overlap. I mean, I think it sounds a lot like what is
known as synesthesia where people in kind of recognizing their senses
and constructing the world realize that sometimes auditory may
overrun into visual and olfactory may be associated with certain
visual or auditory. I saw a lot of that kind of thing when I was
recalling all of this and trying to write it down.
It was an incredibly
interactive realm and one that was very beautiful and kind of vivid
and stunning but in recalling the beautiful music and a lot of the
scenes that I saw, it was very difficult to unravel just because of
this incredible overlap. And it was all ultra-real. It makes the
realm that we live in here on Earth seem very dreamlike in
comparison. It was very sharp and crisp and poignant and
meaningful. Even though I had no words in that realm, the concepts,
conceptual flow, was pure and complete. I mean, in fact words seemed
to be a great bottleneck, a hurdle to understanding compared to the
way information flowed into me there.
So I had that
absolutely lovely scene that I flowed up into that was very rich in
its complexities and also very interactive. Any question in my
mind—and these were not worded questions. I could kind of wonder
why and kind of who and what and the answers to those questions hit
me like these incredible waves of experience. They would come through
me and I would know completely the truth to everything around any of
those queries. And from there this was this very profound sense of
Divine and of the Divine presence that I describe in the book, and
also the importance of love and how powerful love is in that realm.
Then I went outside
of the entire universe and I was out with the orb of light and with
this Divinity and learned so much more. I go into that in detail in
the book but the important thing is that that very rich experience
with profound knowledge coming into me would then suddenly without
any apparent lead-in, I would be back in that earthworm eye view.
And actually I
learned that by recalling the notes of the melody that beautiful
light would come spin up in front of me and then as I kind of
encouraged the melody and remembered more of it, the whole thing
would open up again as a portal into that beautiful, very complex,
rich, ultra-real realm and then back outside of the universe where I
was taught more-or-less. And that happened several times.
It was a real mystery
as I was trying to put it all together and write it down when I came
back, especially that it was back and forth between this murky, very
simple and unresponsive earthworm eye view and the very rich and
vivid and alive and responsive aspects of what I call the Gateway and
the Core which was outside of the entire universe. It took me a long
time to understand why that all was and what that was showing me.
Really it’s taken me about 3-1/2 years to come to my current level
of understanding about what that entire journey meant and what it was
telling me.
Alex Tsakiris:
It’s an absolutely amazing account and it’s amazing on several
levels. One is the detail. You know, it’s unbelievable that you
could have a recollection of that level of detail and you can
remember things happening in the sequence is both remarkable and is
very useful for folks who want to understand whatever message you
could bring back to us from that realm. Which I think is a tricky
subject that we might want to talk more about later.
I also like—and you
bring this out quite clearly in the book—that despite any
uncomfortableness that it might create in someone, the
message is one of Divinity; the message is one of love and a
compassion that goes far beyond what we can imagine in
this Earthly realm but which we often talk about when we talk to
people who have had various kinds of spiritually transformative
experiences. So you do kind of go there, if you will, and kind of
jump right into it and say, “Yep. There’s no question about it.
This was this Divine experience.”
Dr. Eben Alexander:
The phrase, “unconditional love,” people talk about all the time
who have had these kinds of experiences. The words just fail to do it
justice. But it explains so much and the comfort that I found there
and the love and the oneness and the connectedness that we all have
and share is really profound. But of course, this is all confirmed.
It turns out that my
older son had some home from college two days after I got out of the
hospital and he was shocked to see me conversing at all because the
last time he’d seen me I’d been deep in coma. He was just amazed
at this transition. He said it was as if there was a light glowing
within me, which I certainly felt. I mean, I was getting up at 1:30
or 2 every morning and just writing. I was just so elated to be alive
and elated to have been through all this.
But he also advised
me—he could tell I was very interested in writing this up and at
the time my intent was to try and explain it based on neuroscientific
principles because that ultra-reality is just an absolutely stunning
thing. After I wrote down everything I could remember, and he advised
me to do that before I read anything. So in fact, it took me about
six weeks after I got out of the hospital to write down what amounted
to about 20,000 words, which was kind of my core story.
Based on my son Eben’s
advice which is very sage advice, not to read anything at all
about physics, cosmology or near-death experiences until I’d
written my entire story down, then I started reading the near-death
literature and was shocked at the similarities across the board of
what people experienced. In fact, when you research the afterlife
literature going all the way back to the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, TibetanBook of the Dead, and lots of other early writings about
afterlife going all the way back to Ancient Greece, it’s very clear
that the similarities far outweigh the differences and are far more
impressive.
This realm is very
real and this realm is eternal and it’s very reassuring to see all
this confirmation in so many different places. For me, as a
neurosurgeon, it’s pretty clear how the differences arise in some
of these stories and that has a lot to do with the brain and human
mind serving as kind of a filtering function so that our culture and
our personal history can kind of flavor or color our recollections
when we come back from these places. But having been there, I can
tell you that it was far more striking to me the similarities. The
similarities going back for millennia in these writings of people who
have visited these realms.
[I agree that it is the similarities that stand out. My own
awareness sent me through to murky forest to reach a road and see the
light down the road - arclein]
It’s not simply
those who have a near-death experience. There are numerous ways to
have spiritually transformative experiences and to me some of the
most instructive were in Raymond Moody’s recent book, Glimpses
of Eternity, where he talked about shared death experiences where
loved ones–although back in the late 70s it was health care workers
who happened to be there when a patient made a transition over–would
be kind of sucked in along that spiritual journey even to the point
of seeing someone’s life review, a soul’s life review on their
way into the heavenly realm. And then in the shared death experience,
you have a person who is perfectly healthy whose soul gets sucked
along for part of that journey and then comes back to tell about it.
I would say before my
coma, of course, I would have been very tempted to say that’s just
some very kind of stressed-out psychological response. And now I know
that it’s real. That these things indicate kind of the profound
nature of what’s going on with reality and our existence. These are
things that if we really want to understand truth and get to truth,
we need to have a better understanding of what these kinds of
experiences are telling us.
Alex Tsakiris:
Let’s talk a little bit about that because one of the really
fascinating parts of the book is the professional transformation you
go through as a result of this experience. I mean, it’s kind of
like a Flat-Earth kind of thing where you reveal in the book that you
weren’t totally unaware of the near-death experience research. It
was out there; you had heard of Raymond Moody. But it was just
something that you completely looked past because all your training
had said this was impossible. This doesn’t exist. So it creates
this blind spot in your medical knowledge.
I think that process
is fascinating and you’re very open about it. I think it goes a
long way towards helping us understand how we can be in the situation
we’re in in terms of the medical establishment’s and scientific
establishment’s views of these kinds of experiences. Do you want to
talk to that a little bit?
Dr. Eben Alexander:
Yeah. That’s actually one of my favorite subjects, as you can
imagine, is the transition that I went through because of this. I had
grown up in North Carolina in Winston-Salem in a family. My father
was an academic neurosurgeon and he always led me into the scientific
way of thinking. I really spent my life growing up with a scientific
way of thinking. He had also been a combat surgeon in the Pacific in
WWII and I think it was his strong spirituality that got him through
that experience relatively intact because that was a very tough time.
So he gave me both a
spiritual background and we used to go to church, a Methodist church,
when I was growing up. But as much as I wanted to believe in God and
Heaven and the power of prayer and all that, the more I went through
my academic neurosurgical career and I trained at Duke and I spent 15
years on faculty at Harvard Medical School in Neurosurgery, the more
it just seemed to be basically impossible to explain how the
spiritual realm and God and Heaven could exist.
And in fact, I had my
own personal kind of psychic challenge or trauma back in 2000 that
had to do with the fact that I was adopted. That ended up really
crushing out of existence my last hope that there could be a loving
God or that prayers would be answered. And that was in 2000 that that
happened. It was eight years later that I went into coma.
I can tell you that my
journey in coma showed me very clearly the existence and power of
that Divinity that exists and is very real. It also proved to me
beyond any doubt the eternity of our souls. I know that physical
death of the body and brain is not the end; it’s a transition. In
fact, I think many will be quite surprised to find that their
conscious awareness actually expands greatly when they leave the
confines of the physical limitation of human brain and body. That’s
something else that I explain pretty clearly in the book.
[This is a new insight that I did not experience per se.]
For me, it did require
a tremendous amount of education. Having been an academic
neurosurgeon for over 20 years, I thought I understood brain and how
brain generates consciousness and mind and soul, spirit,
what-have-you. But my thinking was clearly that when the brain and
the body die that’s the end of consciousness, soul, spirit. I now
know that’s absolutely not true. And to get to that point after my
experience I really had to learn a tremendous amount about
consciousness that I never had to know as a practicing academic
neurosurgeon.
Because a
neurosurgeon, we know a few things about consciousness. We know a few
things that seem to turn it off. Every day we use general anesthesia,
which is effective at turning off consciousness and yet having used
it for 150 years we still have absolutely no clue how general
anesthesia works. I think that should give the listener a little bit
of an idea of how little we really understand about consciousness. In
fact, my experience showed me very clearly and I go into nine
neuroscientific hypotheses in my book that I entertained and
discussed with others in neuroscience, neurosurgery, trying to
explain how my ultra-real experience might have happened in my brain
given the severity of my meningitis. And none of them work.
So in many ways my
experience showed me that consciousness can exist very richly totally
outside of the brain and body and that it exists in that form after
our body dies. Now, there’s a lot of literature in
trans-personal psychology that has to do with reincarnation and past
life studies and also a tremendous literature on what I call
“phenomena of extended consciousness.”
Some people in the
past would say “psi” or “paranormal” or “parapsychological”
experiences like remote viewing, telepathy, extra-sensory perception,
psychokinesis, out-of-body experiences, all manner of things like
that that I know from my experience since coma are very real
phenomena. There’s that marvelous book, Irreducible Mind that
Ed Kelly and Bruce Greyson and the group UVA put out for any
scientific types who still doubt extended or what we call “non-local”
consciousness.
And also the book by
Pim Van Lommel on Consciousness Beyond Life. Both of those are
marvelous books about consciousness and how it exists and in fact
exists in a much richer form when it’s not encumbered with a
physical brain and body.
Alex Tsakiris:
But I do have to say one of the things I appreciated about the book
is you really don’t venture into those other areas too far, which I
think can get a little bit confusing and a little bit thin in terms
of the real science of it when folks do that. I mean, you allude to
this other body of research out there that you might explore in
consciousness but you don’t go too far in the book.
And also what you do
do in the book which I really appreciate and I thought was great is
because the book is written in a very accessible way and a very
page-turner kind of fashion, you do have an Appendix in the book that
you were just referring to that is in more of neuroscience-ese that
will certainly address pretty directly these kinds of “scientific
arguments” that are often leveled against near-death experience.
By the way, I love
this–you mention that after looking at these scientific
arguments you found that you were shocked by their transparent
flimsiness. So you do have an Appendix in the book that
addresses things from a more medically-oriented standpoint, don’t
you?
[Yes
– a huge mass of empirical evidence has been consistently rejected
on completely flimsy grounds, not least of which is the ongoing
Sasquatch investigation. - arclein]
Dr. Eben Alexander:
I think it’s important. I mean, we’re all in this together. I
think we’re all trying to get to truth so it’s not as if this is
some great battle and somebody’s going to come out winning. I think
all of us really would like to get closer to the truth about our
existence. What my experience forced me to do
was to really come to grips with what we know about consciousness and
what we don’t because it’s all about consciousness.
And of course, just to
clarify for people, in fact some people in my audiences have thought
that only humans are conscious because we’re the ones who talk and
have language. Well, it turns out that consciousness probably goes
way down the evolutionary ladder and in fact I will assure you that
many animals have a very rich consciousness. Many of them probably
have a richer consciousness than we do because the linguistic brain,
that little rational part in our brain—of course, that’s the part
that I put all that tuition money into and all those years of
training to teach myself neurosurgery.
[this
is a very new insight that needs to be followed up on]
It turns out that that
little voice, the rational voice in our head, is not really our
consciousness. In fact, I’ve gotten into a pattern of daily
meditation, centering prayer, things like that ever since my coma
because the real answers lie deep within all of us. We have these
answers in our own consciousness but it involves—my meditations
involve first and foremost turning off that little voice. You know,
the little voice of reason in my head.
In fact, neuroscience
showed 30, 40 years ago with Benjamin Libet’s experiments as a
starting point but others more recently that that little voice of
reason is not the decision-maker that we’d like to think but it’s
actually a passive observer. It’s tied with our ego and with
Self and in fact, what I’ve found is that liberating who I am and
my awareness, liberating that from myself and my ego is a very
important part of trying to get to some of these deeper truths which
I think are accessible through deep meditation or centering
prayer.
Although certainly I
know of patients and families who have gotten this same kind of
bridge to the Divine, to knowing of the Divine, to what I call the
Gift of Desperation, which also can certainly happen in people’s
lives where you just feel like you can’t take another step because
everything has gone wrong and it’s just kind of the end. That’s
when you feel that Divine love inside of you and it’s very real
because it is real.
Again, that’s
something I go into in my book about the power of love and that
unconditional love and how we all are loved. It’s a crucial thing
to understand as we move forward. I think it will help people feel
this connectedness that we all share to read my book and kind of get
how this has changed the way I look at all of our existence and look
at consciousness.
I mentioned a minute
ago about how I had to learn a tremendous amount about consciousness
and I came upon the hard problem of consciousness, which I also would
urge any interested parties to look into if you haven’t done that
yet. The hard problem is actually a very simple thing to say. It’s
simply how does our consciousness awareness that we each know and
experience every waking second, how does that emerge from the
physics, chemistry, biology and anatomy, physiology of the human
brain?
What I can assure you
is that there’s not a soul on Earth who has a clue what the first
sentence in the chapter describing that emergence of consciousness
from the physical brain; there’s no one on Earth who knows how to
start writing that chapter because it’s a very, very deep mystery.
This is something that I’ve really had to come to know full force
because it helps me to understand my whole experience.
And of course, the
other side of it that I discuss briefly in the book has to do with
the enigma of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Quantum
mechanics has been telling us for almost 100 years now that
consciousness paints reality. That there is something very profound
about consciousness that enables a reality to emerge. What we would
consider our common sense, day-to-day knowledge, it says there’s a
reality there and we’re simply passive observers is not correct.
That’s why many very brilliant scientists who came up with quantum
mechanics in the first place were driven to mysticism in trying to
explain what the experiments revealed.
The experiments have
only gotten even more mysterious in recent years, not less so. But I
think the physics community has—I would say they’ve not
necessarily stepped up to the plate to try and answer that although
there are notable exceptions like Roger Penrose has written several
excellent books trying to establish a physics that can be used to
help explain consciousness.
Alex Tsakiris:
So, Dr. Alexander, the name Raymond Moody, of course the pioneering
NDE researcher, his name’s come up a couple times in this
interview. I’d like to explore one aspect of that that I don’t
know if you’re aware of but in your book you’re very open about
your experience of adoption, being adopted as a baby and how that
plays into your near-death experience in a very amazing, mystical
almost kind of way.
I don’t know if
you’re aware but Dr. Moody is a parent of two adopted children and
he tells an amazing story about his son at a very young age coming to
him with this between-lives memory. Raymond Moody’s son says, “I
remember looking down and seeing you and mom on the beach talking
about adoption and I was told ‘You’re going to go join that
family and you’re going to become part of that family.’”
I guess there’s so
many different aspects of that that we could go into but one of the
things I want to explore is does it not seem that a lot of times
these NDEs serve up to us just what we’re looking for? Just what
we’re needing to advance? Sometimes on a level that we can’t even
understand but they somehow fit into our life plan and resolve for us
these life issues.
Dr. Eben Alexander:
Yeah, I think that’s a beautiful point and yes, Dr. Moody is a good
friend of mine. I love him dearly. He’s such a wonderful soul, as
many people who know him will attest. I have heard his telling of
some of the revelations that he has gotten from his adoptive
children. It’s just absolutely beautiful. But you’re exactly
right. And of course I’m sure you saw how in my story it was woven
together to demonstrate very clearly how much of my life and how so
much of my life, especially parts that just didn’t make sense
before all came together and made sense by putting the pieces
together through my NDE.
And it was kind of a
two-way street because my NDE in many ways in my mind was validated
very profoundly as a deep, rich, transcendental, spiritual experience
because of the way it presented to me. And basically through things
that were unknown to me because of the fact that I’d been adopted.
Put up for adoption. And that kind of validation is very powerful. I
think all that in essence, it would certainly seem that it could have
easily been a purposeful thing because the revelation to me was so
profound when I put it all together several months after my coma that
it basically made everything start to make sense once I put it
together.
But you’re right.
It’s amazing how these NDEs often will bring the pieces together
that help our life on Earth that might have seemed somewhat
fragmented before, to bring it all to a point where it makes much
more sense. It’s one of the beautiful gifts that we get out of
these experiences.
Alex Tsakiris:
But there’s also a challenge therein and I think it has to do with
this word “personal” because there is a tendency sometimes for
folks to come back from these experiences and generalize their
personal message and kind of broadcast it out there that hey, I
just talked to God and here’s what He had to say. Or, here’s
what She had to say. And as tempting as it is to go along with that,
and I think anyone who has been into near-death experience research
has been uplifted by some of these accounts, there’s a certain
inability we have to really access that information. We can’t
really take it on face value, can we?
Dr. Eben Alexander:
That’s absolutely true. I think that’s why I try to make a point
in my book that as profound and life-changing as a near-death
experience is, I firmly believe that we all have access to this kind
of knowing. That we don’t have to almost die to get it.
As I point out, that
has a lot to do with meditation or centering prayer, going pretty
deep into our own consciousness and getting away from that linguistic
brain, the ego, and the Self, which erect all these kinds of false
hurdles around us up at the surface level. But to get beneath all
that we can get to some much higher truths that are applicable more
generally. You’re right. I think the lessons that I got out of my
NDE are very good for me and I also think one of the main values of
my NDE is that it very strongly supports that that whole spiritual
realm is very real.
Part of that is it
offers a much more facile explanation of the relationship between
mind and brain and consciousness and reality. So I think it has value
in that sense but a lot of my personal lessons and a lot of the
profound parts of my story that had to do with my adoption and
putting my life back into a piece that made much more sense,
obviously a personal—and for me. But I think the overall story can
help other people to be open and look for similar things in their own
lives and also know that you can find those deep in meditation or in
centering prayer or in other kinds of spiritually transformative,
transcendent states.
Alex Tsakiris:
Well, the book title again is Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s
Experience and Journey into the Afterlife. It’s sure to be a big
success. It’s going to be out right around the same time that this
interview is published in October of 2012. Tell us about the other
things that you’re doing related to this book.
http://www.eternea.org/—tell
us a little bit about that and/or any other things that are going
along with the publication of the book.
Dr. Eben Alexander:
Right. Well, I would urge anyone interested in the book to visit my
personal webpage, which is lifebeyonddeath.net. I’m trying to use
the enthusiasm around this book to help educate people about
Eternia.org, and this is a site that I co-founded with my very good
friend and colleague, John Audette, who is also a founder of IANDS,
the near-death studies group founded over 30 years ago.
John and others, Ray
Moody, Bill Guggenheim, Edgar Mitchell of IONS, and Bob Staraster,
there are numerous people who are helping with the Eternia efforts.
We wanted to serve as an educational platform to help people learn
about all manner of spiritually transformative experiences, so not
just near-death experiences. But a tremendous number of other
spiritual experiences that are out there that help us to know that
God and Heaven and Angels and the whole spiritual realm can be very
real. This can be after-death communications…
Alex
Tsakiris: Terminal lucidity is one of the things you
talk about in the book.
Dr. Eben Alexander:
That I refer to in my book because by—and people can go there.
We’re creating a database where people can tell their own stories.
We’re trying to pay a lot of attention to how the data is entered
so it will be very useful data that we vet on the way. We will open
this to researchers, scientific researchers, consciousness
researchers, those in clergy, and also as I said, have it be an
educational facility for people who are curious about life after
death. Curious about the spiritual realm.
I’m very grateful to
Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut who’s been a wonderful help
in all this. He had this beautiful epiphany on his way back from the
moon back in the early 1970s where he was aware of this consciousness
throughout the universe. And of course, he has addressed that through
IONS and through Quantrack and basically his view being that of
looking at the quantum hologram. Those of you who are interested can
go check into it. It’s part of David Baum and some of the other
models that have to do with interpretation of quantum mechanics.
In my view that kind
of thing really supports information as the core of all existence and
it’s a very short step from the physics statement that information
is at the base of all existence to saying that an intelligent,
omniscient, unconditionally loving creator is that information at the
core of it all. But we are trying with Eternia to bring science and
spirituality much closer. In fact, I think that humanity will see its
greatest progress if we simply open the boundaries of science to
fully encompass all the possibility that belief and faith and knowing
of the spiritual nature of the universe can exist very comfortably
with the latest discoveries in science.
And in fact, as I
said, I really had to go a long way into quantum mechanics. In fact,
a second book which I’m working on will take a lot of the stuff I
had to strip out of the first book, because the first book is really
for the general reader, and I can tell you that to try and fully
explain my experience I had to get right down into the very
fundamentals of causality, free will, predetermination, energy, mass,
time, space. I mean, really had to get down into the nitty-gritty of
reality to try and fully understand it.
And of course, most of
that was far too deep for a book written for the general public so a
lot of that was stripped out but that is something that I’m working
on and hope to finish sometime in the next few years. It’s a major
project as you can imagine. But I think to really put all this
together into a package that makes sense in the year 2012 for very
educated people, we really have to look at all aspects of this.
It goes very deep.
One thing I can tell
you from my experience is I realized that the chasm between our
scientific knowledge and even of the potential for human
understanding, the chasm between that point and where the realm of
this deity and the creative source of this universe is so much
grander than I ever would have thought before. It’s now very clear
to me how the human mind is just not in the right ballpark to ever
weigh in pro or con on the existence of that Creator. We’re a
little closer than lemurs and chimpanzees but not a whole lot.
And so all those
physicists out there who want to write the theory of everything so
they can get first prize in the Publisher Parish Challenge, we’re
never going to know it all. There are some very strong philosophical
reasons why I can say that in the current book and will get into it a
whole lot in my next book.
But don’t worry. The
journey is just fine. It turns out that when we are free of the
limitations of human brain and mind, we actually can get into a
tremendous amount, more knowledge, and that’s one of the
challenges. When I came back, trying to squeeze into this little
brain and body is a very difficult thing, which I found was the
problem with many people who have NDEs. They report that same issue.
And I can tell you
that awareness and understanding is much richer out there and we
unfortunately just can’t bring it all back because we’re only
human. We can get a tremendous amount of insight and we can try and
pass that on to others which I try to do in this book. But we don’t
necessarily bring back all that we’re able to witness when we’re
free in that realm.
Alex Tsakiris:
Well, Dr. Alexander, it’s a wonderful book and it’s a very great
body of work that you’re trying to bring forward. So we wish you
the best of luck with that. We look forward to talking to you in the
future as you move forward with that.
Thanks again so much
for joining me today on Skeptiko.
Dr. Eben Alexander:
Okay, Alex, thank you very much. It was great talking with you.
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The one pictured at top was squishy, but not about-to-burst ready.
