Dr. Eben Alexander's Near-Death Experience Interview
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| Dr. Eben Alexander |
A Harvard Medical School neurosurgeon spent his life
dismissing claims of heavenly out-of-body experiences and refuting such talk
with scientific logic, until he himself had a near-death experience.
Dr. Eben Alexander says he saw heaven and knows the
afterlife exists. Now he's telling the world in his new book, "Proof of Heaven."
His account is the cover story on Newsweek's latest issue,
which features the headline, "Heaven
Is Real: A Doctor's Experience of The Afterlife." Alexander, a Christian,
claims he took the journey to the afterlife when he slipped into a coma in 2008
after contracting a very rare bacterial meningitis.
Alexander describes the heaven he saw over the course of
seven days in a coma in an article for the Daily Beast, a Newsweek affiliate:
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.
Alexander says that he traveled through this heaven,
surrounded by "millions of butterflies," with a woman. This woman
gave him three messages: “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever,"
“You have nothing to fear" and “There is nothing you can do wrong.”
Eventually, the neurosurgeon awoke from the coma. He penned
a book, "Proof of Heaven," describing his journey. The book is due
out Oct. 23.
"Dr. Eben Alexander's near-death experience is the most
astounding I have heard in more than four decades of studying this
phenomenon," reads a review from Raymond Moody, M.D., Ph.D., author of
"Life Beyond Life." He goes on to say that the "circumstances of
[Eben's] illness and his impeccable credentials make it very hard to formulate
a mundane explanation for his case."
"I stood at Eben’s bedside ready to read Last
Rites," writes Rev. Michael R. Sullivan, Rector, Holy Innocent’s Episcopal
Church in Atlanta, Ga. "With vivid detail and description, he invites you
to walk with him to that place none of us has experienced yet in our humanity
we know we shall one day certainly travel. Having survived a near death
experience and brought his neurological expertise and background to it, we gain
both the insight of the mystics in his poetic words and the reality of the
physical world in his scientific explorations."
Still, some remain skeptical. Gawker published a piece
comparing Alexander's story to "Experiences" essays written on
Erowid.org -- a site a featuring a collection of writings from conscious drug
users about their experimentations and trips.
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