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Are these glimpses of the after-life?
2014-10-19, Daily Mail
Posted: 2014-11-03 01:29:38
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2799385/glimpses-life-brain-surgeon-t...
Neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander was convinced out-of-body experiences were hallucinations — until he went into a coma himself and had what he now believes was a glimpse of heaven. Dr Alexander, who has taught at Harvard Medical School, reveals many others have also seen what he described. Dr. Alexander: A near-death experience will change your life in more ways than one. It means you have survived a serious illness or a major accident, for one thing. But the aftermath ... can be even more significant. For me, it was as if my old world was dead and I had been reborn into a new one. Coping with that is hard: how do you replace your old vision of the universe? Many people are going through similar versions of what I went through, and the stories I have heard from other near-death experience witnesses give me courage every day. They are a constant corroboration of everything that was revealed to me — how we are loved and cherished much more than we can imagine, how we have nothing to fear and nothing to reproach ourselves for. If you have never seen yourself as a spiritual person, and perhaps did not even believe in God, this new dimension to your understanding has an even greater impact. One of the most extraordinary things about my own glimpse of heaven was that, back in this world, no one was aware of the transformation that I was undergoing. All the monitors and sensors and computers could detect no activity: my brain was flat-lining. New knowledge like this changes us for ever. We evolve into someone fresh.
Note: Learn a lot more about Dr. Alexander on this webpage. Explore an abundance of inspiring resources on near-death experiences.
So many people believe that they are only their body. Not true. We are each an eternal spirit residing in our individual bodies, our temples for our current lifetime.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/14/neurosurgeon-has-headache-that-leads-to...
Neurosurgeon has headache that leads to trip to heaven, sees millions of butterflies: book
Sunday, October 14, 2012 8:34 EDT
Eban Alexander’s quick trip to heaven started with a headache.
It was November 2008 and a rare bacterial meningitis was fast on its way to shutting down the University of Virginia neurosurgeon’s neocortex — the part of the brain that deals with sensory perception and conscious thought.
“For seven days, I lay in a deep coma,” he recalled. Yet at the same time, Alexander “journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe, a dimension I’d never dreamed existed.”
There he found “big, puffy, pink-white” clouds against a “deep, black-blue sky” and “flocks of transparent, shimmering beings… quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet.”
It turns out Alexander was not alone.
His traveling partner in the afterlife was a young woman with high cheekbones, deep blue eyes and “golden brown tresses” who, amid “millions” of butterflies, spoke to him “without using any words.”
“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever,” she told the doctor, a father of two with movie star looks. “You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.”
Alexander recounts his story, and seeks to explain it, in “Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife,” to be published in the United States on October 23.
His New York publisher failed to respond to interview requests, but an excerpt from “Proof of Heaven” in Newsweek magazine has stirred the enduring debate about life after death.
Inevitably, skeptics wonder if Alexander, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, is going out on a paranormal limb.
“It sounds like he had nothing more than an intense lucid dream,” wrote one reader on Newsweek’s website. “A personal anecdote is not evidence or proof, as moving as it may be,” added another.
The sarcastic New York blog Gawker challenged its readers to spot the difference, if any, between Alexander’s portrayal of paradise with published accounts of LSD trips.
But others stood firmly by Alexander, who has previously spoken of his near-death experience on science TV programs and in a lengthy interview last year with Skeptico.com, a science and spirituality blog.
“If there is evidence and proof of an afterlife, this is probably as good as it gets,” Catholic Online, a Web-based Roman Catholic news service, wrote approvingly.
By one estimate, three percent of Americans — more than nine million — have undergone a near-death experience. Some have written up their stories on the website of the Near Death Experience Research Foundation.
“There are tens of thousands of near-death experiences every year and many of them are very similar to Alexander’s,” said Paul Perry, co-author of several best-selling books on the topic.
“These experiences might be a glimpse into our next miraculous and exciting adventure,” he told AFP in an email. “Unfortunately, there is little meaningful research taking place in this field right now.”
Dean Mobbs, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York who studies neurobiology and fear in humans, did not dismiss Alexander’s experience — but he questioned how it came about.
“I think there’s no paranormal component to it,” said Mobbs, co-author of a paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences identifying near-death experiences as “the manifestation of normal brain functions gone awry.”
“I believe our brains can concoct vivid experiences particularly in situations of confusion and trauma,” he said in an interview. “The brain is trying to reinterpret the world and what’s going on.”
Mobbs cited research in which, for instance, Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke has artificially induced an out-of-body experience by stimulating the point in the brain where the right temporal and parietal lobes meet.
He also recalled how the body can unleash “a massive dose of opioids” in the face of extreme danger. Opioids generate feelings of euphoria like those described by near-death survivors.
Mobbs also noted that many people who claim to have undergone a near-death experience were never, in fact, near death — while the majority of those who have died briefly before resuscitation do not recall going anywhere.
In his Newsweek excerpt, Alexander framed his experience in religious terms.
One of the few places he has had no trouble getting his story across is church, where “the colors of the stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I’d seen in the world above,” he wrote.
“The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed.”
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