Crossing the Veil: A Doctor's Journey Beyond Life

Dr. Eben Alexander was a successful American physician with no spiritual background. He focused on healing bodies, surgeries, and understanding the body as a sophisticated machine. One day, his world turned upside down, and he discovered the world beyond ours. Here's his story: "I spent fifteen years at Harvard Medical School as an Associate Professor of Surgery, specializing in neurosurgery. During these years, I operated on countless patients, including those with severe and life-threatening brain conditions.

"On November 10, 2008, at the age of forty-four, I contracted a rare illness and slipped into a coma for seven days. During that time, my neocortex, the outer layer of the brain that makes us aware, completely stopped functioning.

"My case was the first of its kind in medical history. Spontaneous bacterial meningitis from E. coli is rare in adults. Less than 1 in 10 million people worldwide acquire it annually. This type, caused by a Gram-negative bacterium, is highly aggressive. So aggressive that among those it attacks, over 90 percent experience rapid neurological deterioration and die. That was my mortality rate when I arrived at the ER. As the week progressed and my body didn't respond to antibiotics, that alarming 90 percent edged closer to 100.

"While in the coma, it wasn't just that my brain didn't function properly—it didn't function at all. I now believe this was the catalyst for the profound and intense Near Death Experience (NDE) I had.

"I found myself in a realm of consciousness, existing entirely separate from the limits of my physical brain.

"As a neurosurgeon with decades of research and practical work in operating rooms, I was in a good position to assess not only the reality but also the implications of what happened to me.

"These implications are beyond description. My experience proved to me that the death of the body and brain isn’t the end of consciousness, that the human experience continues beyond the grave. More importantly, it continues under the gaze of Hashem, who loves each of us, cares for us, and watches over the universe and everything in it, guiding its ultimate path.

"The place I went to was real, in the sense that compared to it, the life we're living here and now is entirely dreamlike. But that doesn’t mean I don’t cherish the life I live now—on the contrary, I value it more than ever because I see it in its true context.

"Growing up, despite my desire to believe in Hashem, in this world and in the afterlife, my decades in the rigid scientific discipline of neurosurgery at a university led me to question how such things could exist. Modern neuroscience insists the brain creates consciousness, the soul, the spirit, whatever you call the unseen, intangible part of us that truly makes us who we are, and I had no doubt this was true. Faith might have seemed nice, but science doesn’t deal with what's nice; it deals with what is.

"Remember who I am speaking to you now—I am not a sentimental fool. I know what death looks like. I know how it feels to see a once-living person you've talked and joked with on better days becoming a lifeless object on the operating table after hours of fighting to keep the mechanics of their body running. I understand what suffering looks like and the profound, unanswered grief on the faces of loved ones who have lost someone they never imagined they would lose. I know biology, and although I am not a physicist, I am not entirely ignorant in these matters. I know the difference between imagination and reality, and I know the singular experience I am trying to describe here, as vague and unsatisfactory as it may be, was the most real experience of my life.

"In that place I was, sight and sound weren’t separate. I could hear the beauty of the shimmering silver bodies of the entities above, and I could see the happiness infused in their song. It was as though in that world, it was impossible to see anything or hear anything without becoming a part of it, without connecting to it in some mysterious way. From my current perspective, I would say that in that world, it was impossible to look at anything at all, because the preposition 'at' implies a separation that didn’t exist there. Everything was distinct, clear, yet everything was also part of everything else, like the rich patterns interwoven in a Persian carpet or on a butterfly's wing.

"Though I still had some function of language, at least as we think of it here on earth, I began to ask questions, without words, directed towards this spirit and the divine entity I felt was operating behind or within it.

"Where is this place? Who am I? Why am I here?

"Every time I silently presented one of these questions, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that swept through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these bursts was that they didn’t just silence my questions by overcoming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought as we know it on earth. It wasn’t vague, spiritual, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate, fiery and wet from water, and once I absorbed them, I could understand concepts straight away, concepts that would have taken me years to grasp in my earthly life.

"Surprisingly, my condition was like that of a fetus in the womb. The fetus floats in the womb with its silent partner, the placenta, which nourishes it and manages its relationship with the mother, omnipresent yet unseen. In this case, the 'mother' was Hashem, the Creator, the source responsible for creating the universe and everything within it. This being was so close it seemed there was no distance between Hashem and me. Yet, at the same time, I could feel His vastness, see how utterly tiny I was compared to Him. At times I'll use the word Om as a pronoun for Hashem because that's the name I've used in my writings after the coma. I recalled that Om was the sound I heard associated with Hashem—all-knowing, all-powerful, and unconditionally loving—but any descriptive word fell short.

"It will take me a lifetime, and then some, to unpack what I learned up there. The knowledge I was given wasn’t 'taught' to me as a history lesson or a mathematical theorem is taught. Insights dawned there directly, without the need for nurturing or absorption. The knowledge was stored without memorization, instantly and forever. It hasn’t faded as regular information does, and to this day, I have it all, clearer than any data I acquired in all my years of schooling".

End of Dr. Eben Alexander's account from his book "Proof of Heaven".