Dr. Eben Alexander's Near-Death Experience
Hi, Dr. Eben Alexander.
Thanks for joining me.
I heard you had a near-death experience.
You mind sharing with us please?
I would love to share my experience.
It was something that happened to me back in November, 2008.
And I've spent the last 15 plus years trying to make sense of it and, uh, coming
to a deeper understanding as a scientist.
This kind of meningitis is such a perfect model for human death.
Because it deletes the human part of our brain.
It, in fact, there's a medical case report on my medical records that came
out September, 2018 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, which goes
a long way to help strengthen my story.
It was written by three doctors who were not involved in my care, but were
absolutely fascinated by my recovery, and they make two major points in that paper.
One is that it was a complete global infection of my brain that there were no
parts of the neocortex left unscathed.
Basically it says, my brain could not have had a dream or hallucination.
And yet what I did go through was the most profound, detailed, memorable,
life-changing and transformative set of events, uh, that I could possibly imagine.
And that all happened while my brain was demonstrably offline.
The other key lesson of that case report is that, you know, you
have to also explain my recovery.
When the peer review editors, uh, read the case report, they said, this is absurd!
You don't have people this sick from bacterial meningitis who then
end up making a full recovery.
How do you explain it?
And the three doctors who wrote the case report said it's because
he had a near death experience.
So with that kind of backdrop, I'd like to now share what
that experience was all about.
Why the neuroscientific community pays so much attention to my story.
An important feature of my journey was my amnesia.
That I went into this NDE without any memory of earth, humanity,
Eben Alexander's life events.
It was an empty slate.
Now it all started with what I call an earthworms eye view.
A very primitive course unresponsive realm.
Feeling roots or blood vessels all around me.
It's like being a dirty jello.
It seemed to go for ages, that initial phase.
The good news is it didn't last forever.
There came a slowly spinning white light that came packaged with a perfect musical
melody, that had fine silvery and golden tendrils going off into the edges.
And as it was slowly spinning and came towards me, it opened up like a rip.
And led up into this brilliant, ultra real gateway valley.
This is where I would stress for people that might think that a
near death experience would be kind of vague and dreamy and murky.
This world, this material world is vague and dreamy and
murky compared to that reality.
It was sharp and crystal clear and just really beautiful beyond description.
I was at a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing.
There were millions of other butterflies looping and spiraling in vast formations.
And we were above this incredibly verdant, fertile meadow.
Surrounded by this lush forest.
And the forest and meadows had these waterfalls and the crystal blue pools.
There were thousands of beings dancing in this meadow in
incredible joy and festivity.
And I remember very vividly, dogs jumping, children playing, and all this festivity
was being fueled above because these swooping orbs, of pure kind of oval
spiritual beings, that when I came back to this world, I called them angelic choirs.
And these swooping angelic choirs were emanating chants, anthems, hymns that
would just thunder through my awareness.
It was a spiritual home that was very welcoming.
Now, another thing about that Gateway Valley, I wasn't alone.
There was a beautiful young woman.
Doesn't get better than that.
She had these sparkling blue eyes, high cheekbones, high forehead, broad smile.
She never said a word to me.
She never had to.
Her emotional truths were directly linked to my mind in this, uh, kind
of mind meld as her message to me, which I think was the core message
I was to bring back to this world.
You are deeply loved and cherished forever.
You have nothing to fear.
You are richly cared for and you can do no wrong.
I wish I had explained that last part, you can do no wrong much better in the book.
I was in a realm of such pure love the most optimal way forward was a way of
loving kindness, compassion, mercy, acceptance when necessary, forgiveness.
And that's what I meant by you can do no wrong.
Because that's what transformed so many near-death experiencers
to come back to this world
far more loving.
They come back more spiritual, and yet often less religious.
Because sometimes unfortunately, religions tend to pit us against each
other and pretend that we're not all truly in this together and truly bound
together through these forces of love.
It turns out that, uh, this Gateway Valley was not a final endpoint.
It was a stepping stone to something even grander.
What happened for me next was those angelic choirs
provided yet another portal.
And all of that collapsing down to this complex over sphere.
At that point, I was in what's called the core, and the core is where all dualities
paradoxes are completely resolved.
It's where I came to recognize that my very conscious awareness was sourced
in that infinitely loving God force, that we're never separate from that.
When I entered that core realm, I was told, you are not here to stay.
You'll be going back, but we'll teach you many things.
And there were many lessons and that of course is what I've been
unraveling and talking about for the 15 years since my coma.
But the interesting point for discussion right now is that I would
spontaneously tumble back down and fall back to that earthworm eye view.
And it was by remembering the musical notes, the melody, by going
through that melody in my mind that I could conjure up that light portal.
To me, that was a beautiful lesson.
And people often ask, what about that music?
Do you remember it now?
Could you hum it for us?
Remember that in that realm, you're not hearing with the ears and it, it's
gone far beyond just being vibrations of air molecules hitting the eardrums.
Uh, likewise, we can see far more than you can see with the eyes.
You have knowledge through direct identification, you
become huge sways of the scene.
Uh, but anyway, I would, I would tumble back down to the earthworm eye view.
By remembering the musical notes, I could conjure up the melody again.
And I made that journey several times and had multiple lessons in the passage.
Uh, and in many ways, the medium was the message.
The very fact I could have these kind of, uh, transitions in level of
consciousness was teaching me a tremendous amount about the spiritual realm and
consciousness in general, and about the aspects of it that are far above
and beyond anything having to do with the filtering effects of the brain.
I learned as a neuroscientist, the brain does not create consciousness at
all, it's a transceiver or a filter.
And this is why when the brain and body die, it's not the
end of conscious awareness.
It's actually an expansion and growth of your conscious awareness
as you're liberated from the shackles of the brain and body.
This is why it is such an adventure and nothing to be feared.
For people who think, well, I don't like this life.
I don't like this material world.
Why can't I just be up there forever in that heavenly realm?
The reason is because we have work to do as souls in this realm.
The goal is not to end up spending forever in the, in that heavenly realm.
I mean that eternal perfection doesn't contribute to the growth of the one mind.
Now, there did come a time, of course, where the melody didn't work.
It no longer conjured up that beautiful light portal.
To say I was sad at that time would be a bit of an understatement.
But I also knew I could trust, that I would be taken care of.
I had gotten that assurance every time I passed through the core,
through my guardian angel, that I was deeply loved and cherished.
Every bit of that was now part of my understanding, and this is where I then
witnessed thousands of beings going off around me into the distance, heads bowed,
this murmuring energy coming up to me.
But I was now down in that kind of early, uh, more foreboding phase.
The earthworm eye view, and yet I felt this beautiful loving peaceful
energy of being in a spiritual home coming from these beings around me.
What I called all that when I came back to this world weeks
later, was the power of prayer.
All these people with heads bowed, some holding candles, arms up in front
of them in that murmuring energy, even though I couldn't understand any
of the words 'because of my amnesia,
I could certainly appreciate this beautiful feeling of love and connection
that was coming from that process.
At that point that I then saw six faces that would bubble up out of the muck.
I can remember 'em right now in my mind as vividly as if that had all happened
this morning, and yet when I first saw them in the NDE, I did not recognize them.
I had no idea who these beings were, but they were important because
in the hours later as I was waking up and things were coming back to
me, They turned out to be people.
Five of the six were physically present in the I C U room.
For the last 24 hours I was in coma and there were many family and
friends who had been there earlier in the week who did not show up,
uh, in those memories.
And so to me what that helped to do was prove that the vast majority of
the spiritual journey, which seemed to go on for months or years, had
to happen between days one and four, or one and five of a seven day coma.
And I explained the timing of that a bit and Proof of Heaven and, especially in the
second book, Living in Mindful Universe.
But the reality is, that timing was very important for, for understanding.
So it, it showed me, this all didn't just happen when I was coming out of
coma or somehow get put in there going deep into coma, but that these memories
had to happen during that phase when in fact, the case report shows my
Glasgow Coma Scale and neurologic exams
would have prevented any, uh, possibility of, of, of a big
dream or hallucination happening.
I will also explain though, that one of those faces that I
saw was not physically present.
I said five of six were physically there and the one who wasn't
physically there was an old friend of mine, uh, from college.
Actually we'd met in 1972,
in freshman English at UNC Chapel Hill, and then we lost track of each other.
But, uh, my family knew that she had helped people who were in coma and
other illnesses through channeling.
She wrote a book called Third Eye Open.
Her name is Susan Reintjes, and I remember she was as present to me as anyone else
who appeared as those final six faces.
And when I woke up and in the first hours and day or so is my, uh,
memories of who these people were, was coming back to me and I can
finally identify my family members.
I said, well, what about, and Susan, she was here?
And they said no.
Well, she was never physically there, that she channeled to me nights four and
five of coma due to their request that she helped me come back from this coma.
And I remembered her as if she had been there physically.
She, to me was, you know, just like everybody else.
And of course I knew by that point, that in the spiritual realm of space
and time are no longer impediments to communication between souls and spirits.
And now it's a sixth face though that drove me back to this world.
A 10 year old boy.
It was my son Bond, and I didn't recognize him when I saw him.
The doctors had held a family conference where they said I'd gone from a
10% chance of survival down to a 2% chance, but with no chance of recovery.
That's why they were recommending stopping the antibiotics, letting
nature take its course, letting me go.
And of course they protected Bond from the worst news during that week.
And when he overheard this, he knew things were much worse than he'd been told.
He came running down the hallway, pulled open my eyelids one eye
looking over there, one over there.
Neither pupil working.
Anybody in medicine knows that's a horrible picture.
And I'm certain I didn't see him with my eyes or hear him with my ears because my
brain and sensory systems and all that were far too damaged by the meningitis.
But somehow his pleading with me got through to me,
daddy, you're gonna be okay!
Daddy, you're gonna be okay!
As if somehow that would make it so.
And I didn't understand the words, didn't recognize him, but oh my
gosh, now everything mattered.
I'd spent this whole journey with amnesia, kind of giving me this little,
uh, blanket of comfort that it could all continue or cease, did not matter.
Now I realized everything mattered.
It was the toughest thing I, I've ever had to do in my life was
clawing my way back to this world.
It's like crawling out of this gravel pit where every reach up brings in a, uh, all
this tons of gravel and you can't get out.
And yet, somehow it happened!
When I did start waking up in that ICU bed struggling against the ventilator,
and finally they pulled the tube out.
I went, thank you!
So I don't remember a lot of what happened in the next, uh, day and a
half, but my sister, Phyllis reminded me that I was sitting on the bed
there and she said it was the most amazing thing because they thought
I was gonna die and never come back.
Then they saw me coming back wondering, what's this gonna look like?
And said that, uh, literally within minutes I was just sitting there on
the bed and I would look at each and every person surrounding me and I'd
say, don't worry, all is well, and then I'd move on to the next person.
Don't worry, all is well.
And she said it was the most amusing thing, I think because
they were so worried about me.
And there I was trying to tell them there's nothing to worry about.
But interestingly enough, uh, in the next, uh, 36 hours after waking up, I
was in and out of a paranoid, delusional psychotic nightmare an ICU psychosis.
It was very directly linked to that crazy meningitis.
It was still badly affecting my brain.
It was extraordinary, but then I entered that phase of healing.
And it really, it took about two months for all of my memories to come back
and that, uh, but interestingly enough, based on, uh, uh, conversations with
close family and friends, I realized the memories post coma were more complete
than the memories had been pre coma.
That's kind of astonishing, but it brings up the point, uh, that we elaborate on in
that book, Living in a Mindful Universe that, uh, neurosurgeons are beginning
to accept that uh, long-term memories are not stored in the brain at all.
It's one of the final nails in the coffin of materialist neuroscience.
You can damage a conversion of short-term to long-term memories by
damaging the medial temporal lobes, hippocampus and those structures.
We learned that in the early 1950s, but that doesn't have anything to do
with, uh, long-term memory storage.
They don't seem to be stored the brain at all.
I've spent the 15 years, uh, since my coma, working with scientists around the
world, coming to a deeper understanding of this and what I can tell you now.
There's a tremendous revolution going on in the scientific community, acknowledging
the reality, not only of near death experiences, but a tremendous body
of evidence supporting shared death experiences, telepathy, remote viewing.
All of these things figure into a much bigger model of consciousness.
Well, anybody wants to get to know this revolution.
Read Living in a Mindful Universe, and you will certainly get an
idea where this is all headed.
Really, it's a very exciting time.
Personal Journeyers now can take this lead from the scientific world and
start doing their own work of exploring consciousness and start coming into
the same healing and wholeness that
so many other people are doing through these modalities.
One of the greatest gifts is realizing the power we have to bring wholeness
and healing into our own lives.
And you, you say in your book that you weren't, um, or you were having a
hard time believing in a loving God.
Would you consider yourself an atheist?
At the time?
I would say I was more of an agnostic.
I went through, uh, a dark night of the soul, uh, before my coma.
Very important.
And I talk about that in, in Proof of Heaven.
I quit saying prayers with my sons.
I quit taking them to church.
Uh, and really that dark night of the soul came to an end eight years
later with my near-death experience.
Uh, where can people find more about you and your work and your books?
Well go to e, e b e n alexander.com and especially pay attention to the blog
postings there, to the recommended reading list, which has more than a hundred
books, chapters, scientific papers, many with hot links right to the papers.
Also, the FAQ page is very important.
It answers a tremendous number of questions.
Uh, also, I would encourage people to go to sacredacoustics.com.
There's a free 20 minute om download, and the training videos are very instructive.
And the final main site I'd recommend is innersanctumcenter.com.
That's I N N E R sanctum center.com.
We realize there were many kind of thought leaders around the world,
scientific experts, unconsciousness, and other experiencers that we would not
be seeing now because of the pandemic and all of our travel was canceled.
But we started every two weeks, uh, interviewing, uh, these
people, these luminaries that we would've been on stage with.
And those interviews are all available for free at innersanctumcenter.com.
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