Top Harvard-Educated Brain Surgeon Says Afterlife Exists

MrMojoRisin

I thought this story might be of interest to people. Recently, an American neurosurgeon named Dr. Eben Alexander has declared his belief in an afterlife after he experienced an out-of-body experience when he lapsed into a coma in 2008.

He was comatose for seven days after contracting meningitis, which, he says, caused the part of his brain which controls human thought and emotion to shut down. Yet, he claims his consciousness was intact and he met ethereal beings with whom he communicated telepathically, leading him to believe there is an afterlife.

What he says:

Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.


In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/07/proof-of-heaven-a-doctor-s-experience-with-the-afterlife.html

Video of Dr. Alexander being interviewed: http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/2012/10/26/answers-from-heaven.html

Another article on Alexander's claims: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2214836/It-place-clouds-big-puffy-pink-white-The-prominent-neurosurgeon-convinced-theres-heaven-body-experience.html

A sceptical take on Dr. Alexander's claims: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/11/dr-eben-alexander-proves-need-heaven

Excerpt of article from The Guardian (above):

In 2008, Alexander was struck down by meningitis and spent seven days in a coma. Science says that, during this ordeal, everything should have gone blank since his neocortex wasn't functioning. But this celestial Columbus claims that, while apparently flat out, he was actually on "a hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey" to the final frontier.



He floated over fluffy clouds, met "transparent … shimmering beings" and was guided through this timeless world by a beguiling female. It was all, he writes reassuringly, "an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting".


At least he didn't mention a bright white light, but in every other way his account contains just about heavenly cliche known to humankind. Proof of Heaven may have a certain cachet because its author is, by profession, "a man of science", and therefore, by the crude logic of our secular, sceptical 21st-century society, better placed than most to see through the ultimate claim of religion, but this book sounds like pretty run-of-the-mill near-death experience literature.And there's plenty of it around.



The International Association for Near-Death Studies, founded in 1981, claims to speak for a constituency of 15 million in the US alone. In hugely popular books such as psychologist Raymond Moody's Life After Life, thousands of travellers report back on an extra-terrestrial world of painlessness, mysticism, peculiar light and beautiful but intangible guides to a divine pleasure dome.


What is most remarkable about these accounts is how similar they are to each other and to a whole literature that stretches back through the centuries. Once, the very same topography was part of the beatific vision, fashioned by Christian theologians such as Saint Augustine as a heavenly landscape to frame the face of God.


The similarities prompt one of two responses. Either it must be true because so many people say it is. Or they are borrowing from each other one of the biggest collective delusions we have ever known. Or, perhaps, there is a third, more plausible explanation.

I think that experiences like these - which are very common - are always subjective because they're so personal. If a person believes in something, then they have their own very personal reasons for believing in it.

martomcg

Take acid and have similar experiences.

Does that mean acid is a gateway to heaven?

He was in a coma and dreaming. Simple as.

Pushtrak

Sam Harris posted a response to him. Or about him. Bleh, whatever. Anyway, here it is.

Myrddin

Who knows what effects there are for shutting down one part of the brain like that, perhaps the brain generates these 'experiences' as a form of protection for the personality of the person or something.

There'f far too many unknowns at work here

nagirrac

I would encourage anyone with a serious interest in this topic to visit the NDERF website and read "Consciousness beyond Life" by Pim van Lommel or "Evidence of the Afterlife" by Jeffrey Long. I don't think you will learn a lot by reading a book by one NDE experiencer (although the individual who wrote this book has taught and researched neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School for 15 years, so knows a bit about the brain) or by reading a skeptic's response who likely didn't read the book. A good site for reading about the topic including interviews with leading researchers and skeptics is www.skeptiko.com.

There is evidence for NDE, just as there is evidence for reincarnation (the work of Ian Stevenson in particular) that suggests consciousness can exist outside the body. The problem of mind-body or mind-brain is a huge challenge for science and will need a significant breakthrough before we understand it better. I would recommend ignoring anyone taking extreme positions on the nature of consciousness whether it is from a materialist or religious standpoint, keep an open mind and actually read the research that is going on. To me the only logical approach at this point is to remain agnostic on the whole question of how consciousness interacts with the physical world which interestingly enough is also the view of Sam Harris.

maccored

this isnt directly related to the op, but its an extension of the whole mind thing. If you look at shamanism and even pagan druid/witch/priest/whatever rituals, what these people say happen is they travel to another dimension /world/ somewhere internally, through their mind. Its not an hallucination as this other world seems to always be the same, have the same people and seems to age the same as real life.

Again, Im not saying 'i know thats true' or anything - I just think its interesting that some people view the mind as a tool to take themselves to some other, physical place.