Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, wrote a 2012 bestselling book, Proof of Heaven, in which he described his remarkable near-death experience. This account is highly significant for several reasons, primarily because it occurred to a neurosurgeon. Alexander’s background was described in the book as including 15 years on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, an author or co-author of more than 150 chapters and papers for peer-reviewed medical journals, and presentations of his findings at more than 200 medical conferences around the world.
On November 10, 2008, at the age of 54 Alexander had a profound NDE. According to his account he began experiencing severe pain and soon lost consciousness. He was rushed to the emergency room of Lynchburg General Hospital where tests determined that he had bacterial meningitis, With this disease bacteria first attacks the cortex of the brain, that outer layer responsible for memory, language, emotions, visual and auditory awareness, and logic. Only 10 percent who arrive in an emergency room with a rapid downward spiral in neurologic function survive, and many of those spend the rest of their lives in a vegetative state ..
Alexander’s condition continued to decline. By Friday he had been on triple intravenous antibiotics for four full days, still wasn’t responding, and remained in a coma. On Sunday morning his family met with Alexander’s main doctor to discuss discontinuing treatment in the face of almost certain lifelong coma. Overhearing this discussion Alexander’s 10-year-old son ran into his room sobbing, kissed his forehead, pulled up his eyelids and said, directly into his empty, unfocused eyes, “You’re going to be okay, Daddy. You’re going to be okay.” Suddenly his eyes popped open and he was back.
During his seven days in a coma, without any higher brain functioning at all, Alexander experienced a very deep and unusual NDE that he describes as follows. Initially he had a kind of consciousness without memory or identity in a visible kind of darkness, like being submerged in dirty Jell-O. There was a deep, rhythmic pounding sound. He had no body, no language or emotion and no notion of time. At a certain point he became aware of objects around him that were a little like roots and a little like blood vessels that glowed a dark dirty red in a vast, muddy womb. Later he described the experience as being like that of an earthworm and began calling this the realm of the earthworm’s- eye view. The longer Alexander stayed in this place the more he felt trapped. Grotesque animal faces bubbled out of the muck, groaned or screeched, and then left.
At some point something new emerged from the darkness above, an entity so beautiful words couldn’t adequately describe it. This entity turned slowly radiating fine filaments of white-gold light, which began to splinter the darkness around him and break it apart. The spinning light got closer and closer, and at its very center an opening appeared and he found himself moving through it.
Alexander then discovered himself in the most beautiful world he’d ever seen, flying over a countryside that was green, lush, and earthlike and seemed both strange and yet familiar. People were singing and dancing around in circles and children laughed and played. Alexander realized that he wasn’t alone. There was a beautiful girl with him, and they were riding along together on the wing of a butterfly. Millions of other butterflies were all around them forming vast fluttering waves like a river of life and color. The girl looked at him with love he felt was higher and more genuine and pure than all the different types of love we have on earth. Without using any words, she spoke to him “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.” “You have nothing to fear.” “There is nothing you can do wrong.”
Alexander found himself in a place of big, puffy, pink-white clouds that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Immeasurably higher than the clouds flocks of transparent orbs, shimmering beings, arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer-like lines behind them. He began hearing a sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant that seemed to be coming down from the orbs above.
For him, seeing and hearing were not separate. He could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above and could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. A warm divine breeze was blowing that changed everything, shifting the world around him into an even higher octave, a higher vibration. Behind or within that wind Alexander sensed a divine being at work. Although he had little language function, as we think of it on earth, he began wordlessly putting questions to that being. Where is this place? Who am 1? Why am I here? Each time he silently posed one of these questions, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through him like a crashing wave. As he received them he was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken years to fully grasp in his earthly life.
Alexander continued moving forward entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Although it was pitch black, it was also brimming over with light. This was the divine being, God. It was personal, and it knew him deeply. The being possessed the qualities we possess, only, in infinitely greater measure, overflowing with warmth, compassion, pathos, and even irony and humor.
He sensed a brilliant orb near him that was living and almost solid, who was also the girl on the butter-fly wing, guiding him. Through the orb, the being told him that there is not one universe but more than he could conceive. Love lay at the center of them all. Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts. It is necessary because without it free will would be impossible. Without free will there could be no growth, no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be.
Alexander was shown that there is an abundance of life throughout the countless universes, including some whose intelligence is advanced far beyond that of humanity. He saw that there are countless higher dimensions. Our world of time and space is tightly and intricately meshed within these higher worlds, and all worlds are part of the same overarching divine reality. Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything, the day-to-day kind that everyone knows, the kind of love we feel when we look at our spouse, and our children, or even our animals. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous or selfish, but unconditional. This is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it and embody it in all of their actions.
At some point Alexander sensed something pulling at him, and he realized he was going back, away from what he came to call the core. He moved back down into the darkness of the realm of the earthworm’s-eye view. However, he realized he could move back up to the higher planes, and he made the back-and-forth movement from the muddy darkness to the green brilliance of the gateway and into the black but holy darkness of the core any number of times. Each time he reached the core, he went deeper than before, and was taught more.
A point came when Alexander found that he could not reenter the core. The spinning melody wouldn’t take him there. The gates of heaven were closed. He felt a sense of sadness unlike any he’d ever known. Heartbroken, he sank into a world of ever increasing sorrow. But he heard praying that gave him energy and a strange confidence that everything would be all right. Faces bubbled out of the muck that were human now, and they were saying things that he couldn’t make out but sensed were important to him in some way. He was aware of six faces and realized one was a boy pleading for him to return.
When his eyes opened he looked around at his loving family and caregivers gathered around his bed and with a peaceful, joyous smile and said,” All is well.” But all was not well. For a time, Alexander experienced wild delusions of skydiving, a favorite activity, then entered a strange and exhausting paranoid universe. He became obsessed with an ugly background of “Internet messages” that would show up whenever he closed his eyes. Then for a time he became convinced that his wife, whose name he still didn’t know, and his physicians were trying to kill him. In one intense fantasy he found himself in a South Florida cancer clinic featuring outdoor escalators where he was pursued by his wife, two police officers, and a pair of Asian ninja photographers on cable pulleys. Alexander soon began to realize that these nightmares and paranoid fantasies were just imaginary, something cooked up by his very beleaguered brain as it was trying to recover its bearings. He was going through “ICU psycho-sis” that’s normal for patients whose brains are coming back online after being inactive for a long period.
After he had regained normal mental functioning and thought about his experience Alexander realized that as meaningful as it was he had one regret. Others reporting NDEs encountered loved ones, but he did not. He had always known he was adopted, given away as an infant by his biological parents. His adoptive parents and family loved him deeply he knew, and the one person he would have liked to meet and be comforted by was his deceased adoptive father.
Alexander had in the recent past succeeded in making contact with his biological parents and learned that they always loved him but felt forced to give him up to parents who could better care for him. He was told that he had a biological sister, a person very special in many ways, who had died some years before. Four months after returning from the hospital, a birth family sister sent him a picture of her. She looked strangely, hauntingly familiar. Taking another look the awareness dawned. It was she who appeared to him as the loving guide in his NDE. In that one moment,” Alexander wrote, “in the bedroom of our house, on a rainy Tuesday morning, the higher and the lower worlds met”