The Near-Death Experience of a Brain Surgeon

Dr. Eben Alexander is one of the world's leading neurosurgeons, a graduate of the prestigious Harvard University. Four years ago, he nearly lost his life to what he describes as "the impossible on top of the impossible," when a deadly bacterium attacked him, resulting in meningitis. As a result, he found himself in a coma for an entire week.

Scans showed that his entire cerebral cortex—the part responsible for awareness, thought, memory, and understanding—was completely inactive. Doctors gave him little chance of survival, and informed his family that if he did survive, he would likely remain brain damaged for the rest of his life. Nurses entered his room one by one, lifted his eyelids, shone a flashlight, but there was no response. "It was as if no one was there," one nurse recalled to an ABC NEWS interviewer. Against all odds, Alexander awoke from his coma a week later. But as the nurse described, he truly wasn't there yet; only the simplest functions of his brain began to operate, and Alexander was far from being aware or connected to reality. It was then that Alexander experienced what he calls "the journey to heaven"—later the title of his book describing the experience. "In every sense of the word, that's what I experienced," the senior surgeon attests.

"In my earliest memories, I had no language, and all my earthly memories were forgotten," he describes. "I had no physical sensation or body awareness whatsoever. I was a sort of consciousness particle in a dark and gloomy atmosphere, and it seemed as if I had been there for a long time, I would say years." He then recalls being saved by "a large and magnificent light spinning, a stunning melody opening into a plane full of blossoms and incredible complexity." He also describes a "light full of love, intelligence, and eternity," which for him was a divine experience.

A young woman accompanied Alexander in his journey to heaven. After his recovery, Alexander, who was adopted, received a photo of his sister from his biological family. It turned out that the woman who accompanied him was none other than... his biological sister whom he had never met(!). Many might prefer to think that Alexander's experiences were merely hallucinations, but not him: "I know for sure that it happened, and it happened outside the brain," he affirms.

Clinical death events and experiences similar to Alexander's occur to thousands of people worldwide, but as a neuroscientist, he insists on proving it scientifically. In his view, it is impossible that his brain could have created under its severe condition the ideas and experiences he encountered. "If you were to ask me what a person would remember when their brain was in the state mine was, I would tell you that it's impossible to remember anything," explains Alexander. "The severe meningitis would have prevented dreams and hallucinations, as these require a certain level of cerebral cortex function."

Today, Dr. Eben Alexander believes in the eternity of consciousness, the soul, and the spirit, which do not depend on the physical existence of the brain. "In fact,"

he concludes, "the soul is freer and knows more when it is released from the confines of the body."