Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife

Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife

Book by Eben Alexander (Author)

 


DETAILS


Publisher : Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (October 23, 2012) Language : English Paperback : 196 pages ISBN-10 : 1451695195 ISBN-13 : 978-1451695199 Lexile measure : 1150L Item Weight : 7.2 ounces Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.64 x 8.38 inches , The #1 New York Times bestselling account of a neurosurgeon's own near-death experience— for readers of 7 Lessons from Heaven . Thousands of people have had near-death experiences, but scientists have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those scientists. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander knew that NDEs feel real, but are simply fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress. Then, Dr. Alexander’s own brain was attacked by a rare illness. The part of the brain that controls thought and emotion—and in essence makes us human—shut down completely. For seven days he lay in a coma. Then, as his doctors considered stopping treatment, Alexander’s eyes popped open. He had come back. Alexander’s recovery is a medical miracle. But the real miracle of his story lies elsewhere. While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself. Alexander’s story is not a fantasy. Before he underwent his journey, he could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. Today Alexander is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition. This story would be remarkable no matter who it happened to. That it happened to Dr. Alexander makes it revolutionary. No scientist or person of faith will be able to ignore it. Reading it will change your life. Read more

 


REVIEW


Proof of Heaven was both interesting and surprisingly suspenseful; I always looked forward to picking it up and continuing my reading. The author is an impeccably educated and highly respected neurosurgeon who had been adopted and followed in the professional footsteps of his adoptive father; had been an experienced shy diver in college; married and had children; longed to meet his birth family and finally did; somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis; and while moving toward death in a coma, claims to have gone to heaven where he met God, an angel, and had other unquestionably (for him) heavenly experiences that he lived to share with others, asserting that collectively they represent "the single most real experience of my life." A fascinating and gripping story!--but that said, it's time to take a close look at the author's claim, namely, that there is "Heaven" after death, or more generically, that consciousness survives death. I think it not unreasonable--indeed, fundamental--to require of someone who insists his or her experience proves consciousness survives bodily death both to have died and subsequently to have returned to life sometime prior to making such an assertion. Any claim to have experienced death and to know what occurs after it without having first died would seem absurd on its very face. Indeed, initially Alexander claims to have died: "My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave." (I think it premature to claim having experienced "death of the body" if one's respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems are functioning, and only the nervous system is damaged--however severely.) So, I could only shake my head in wonderment when he claimed later not to have died but to have had a NEAR death experience (NDE). Throughout, he refers to his experience as an NDE and compares the experiences of other NDE survivors to his own, noting--until nearly the end of his book--that his NDE was similar to those recounted by other NDE survivors save their meeting deceased relatives and reviewing their life's good and bad actions: "I experienced none of these events, and taken all together they demonstrate the single most unusual aspect of my NDE." Then, in a patently self-contradictory statement, he writes, "At the risk of oversimplifying, I was allowed to die harder, and travel deeper, than almost all NDE subjects before me." With a sentence like that, I don't think he need worry about oversimplifying. So, we have an author claiming to know what happens to consciousness after death based on his own experience of death even though he repeatedly admits that he had not died at any time prior to his claim. For me, this turns his assertion of having entered the foyer of heavenly life into evidence that, at most, he had arrived only at the derriere of his earthly life. My second quandary is the medium responsible for his right to claim he was in heaven, namely, sensing and feeling: While in what he calls the "Realm of the Earthworm's-Eye View," he notes, "...gradually this sense of deep, timeless, boundaryless immersion gave way to something else: a feeling like I wasn't really part of this subterranean world at all, but trapped in it." A little further down, he writes, "I heard an occasional dull roar," and, "the movement round me became less visual and more tactile...," and, "then I became aware of a smell." Later, after he had passed through the portal of heaven, he was told something by an angel, and her "message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief." When he's in the Core (of heaven), he writes, "Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see [sic] the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang." It's curious to me that sensation, however modified his seeing and hearing were in heaven, were, nonetheless, one of his modes of knowing. This would make earthly hearing and seeing weak analogues of their heavenly counterparts, but more remarkably, not only our consciousness survives death, but also our senses! This implies that the material organs of sight and hearing are not essential to these capabilities. We do know that we can hear music in our mind that we are not hearing with our ears and see things in our mind that are not present to our eyes under two conditions: we're dreaming, or we've consciously induced them. But Alexander insists he is not dreaming and others are generating the sounds, sights, and smells. Although his claim fits his theory of post-death consciousness, he never died, and for those of us who are still pre-dead, a dreaming or inducing explanation is simpler and less fantastical. Also, we do know that physical eyes and ears are essential to earthly seeing and hearing under either of the main concepts of the body-mind relationship: that we are a mind (soul, spirit) trapped in a body and finally freed of it upon death, or we exist as an inseparable body-mind unity. Under the first condition, there would have to be some plausible theory to explain how the soul retains senses once it's left the body. Under the second condition, body and soul exist only as an integrated entity, at death extinguishing together. A related problem, advanced by his description of consciousness after death, is duality--or, if you will, the multiplicity of separately distinguishable beings/things/experiences in the post-death realm. Alexander's heaven eliminates the ego but retains distinct beings outside himself (for example, he doesn't claim to be God or the angle). Okay, maybe he wants to suggest that none of these separate and distinct beings have an ego, but something has to account for his recognizing that they (perceivable beings, music, smells, visuals of various kinds) are real and are not just his projections. Maybe they exist like thoughts, perceptibly existing immaterial objects. The only problem with this is that we conjure our thoughts, and subconscious mechanisms conjure our dreams. I'm sure Alexander is not suggesting that his heaven is populated by conjured images--and he insists they're not dreams--but I don't see how he can escape the conundrum. Celestial existence for Alexander often seems conceptually similar to earthly experience, differing primarily in quality and seeming often little more than exquisite extensions of ordinary life. He does write, "The blurring of the boundary between my awareness and the realm around me went so far at times that I became the entire universe." What is surprising about this statement is the "at times." At one point in my life, I was an intermittent TMer. After several years of erratic adherence to my meditation practice, I routinely experienced extended periods non-dualistic absorption into a unitary bliss, timelessness, spacelessness, even occasional out-of-body consciousness. Thus, "at times" I had earthly experiences that were not dissimilar to what he describes as a peak heavenly experience--and I didn't have to die to experience them, making me wonder just how other-worldly they are. Alexander states that "up there" there's no emotional distinction between "inside" and "outside" because changes of "mood" experienced there are so vast as to include and affect both the mood feeler and his or her surroundings simultaneously. Commenting further on emotions, he writes, "All the human emotions are present [in heaven]...." Does he really want to assert that greed, avarice, lust, hate, and other such emotions reside with love in God's paradise? This completely contradicts other statements about the heavenly environment. He does mention evil, as necessary for there to be free will, which is required "for us to become what God longer for us to be." However, he does not raise the issue of moral behavior as a prerequisite for heaven or as even affecting one's access to or enjoyment of heaven. Should I ever enter Alexander's rapture, I hope not to attend a dance and see Mother Theresa grinding with Adolph Hitler. But maybe I will, given that "in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant" over evil. Finally, the author's recitation of numerous failed attempts to explain his mental states while in a coma go only so far as demonstrating that extremely rare phenomena are less susceptible to explanation than are common ones. I hardly think that such a recognition would startle anyone. So, at best, I see Proof of Heaven as an engaging addition to NDE literature and at worst, an unsupported, indeed self-contradictory and sloppily analyzed, claim to a reality that fails to meet even the most obvious precondition: One has actually to die, not just come close to it, before earning the right to assert the post-death condition of consciousness. Of course, my concern about basing a belief in an afterlife on Alexander's experience while in a coma is irrelevant to whether or not there is an afterlife. I just don't think Proof of Heaven gets us any closer to proving it than we were with former NDE accounts. He may have been "allowed to die harder" than previous NDEers, but like them, he didn't die. I think he should have remained more the scientist upon coming out of his coma and considered his experience as evidence of what the brain may still do after the cranial cortex is compromised. Rather than counting on eternal consciousness, I think we should work on coming to terms with death's being the close of our one and only, randomly engendered, and unrepeatable existence. If we awake to having been mistaken and find ourselves in another dimension, nothing will be lost. If we don't awaken in paradise, we will not grieve it. In the meantime, we won't violate the knowable and will experience how precious, fleeting, and irreplaceable life is--ours and that of all other beings. It might be easier to have compassion for one another, if we don't presume that upon death we're whisked off to "a better place" where we'll all be reunited in bliss.

 


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