An ethereal experience
Dr Eben Alexander is one lucky man to have experienced God’s luminosity – or thinks he did according the skeptics. Skeptics have their place in the larger scheme of things, and a very important place too, for it is skepticism that is one impetus behind inquiry.
As a neurosurgeon and scientist, Dr Alexander was a skeptic too and felt that since he understood the brain, “there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death”. But all that changed when he went into coma for seven days, his brain switched off and flat-lined and he was on life support. I will tell you Dr Alexander’s story as far as possible in his own words lest I lose some of the essence in paraphrasing him.
Dr Eben Alexander contracted the E-coli virus that started eating his brain. In coma, “the human part of my brain, the neo cortex, was inactivated”. That is significant because doctors believe that what clinically dead people experience are hallucinations that come from the neo cortex. But Dr Alexander’s neo cortex shut down too and his brain flat-lined. After seven days in coma his doctors thought of taking him off life support, because they thought that even if he lived he would be a vegetable. Then his eyes popped open.
In coma and clinical death, Dr Alexander experienced, in his own words, “something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death…There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind – my conscious, inner self – was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility… But that dimension – in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states – is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world, a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast and incalculably positive journey.”
“During the course of my adventure I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep-blue sky… Higher than the clouds – immeasurably higher – flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer-like lines behind them.” He says that the words ‘birds’ and ‘angels’ don’t do “justice to these beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.” There was pure joy, says Alexander. He heard a “huge and booming sound” from above and “wondered if the winged beings were producing it… Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place.” He could hear “the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang.”
earing and seeing were transposed, as it were – he would see sounds and hear images. “You could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming part of it – without joining with it in some mysterious way.” Like in the Sufi way, “you couldn’t look at anything in that world at all, for the word ‘at’ itself implies a separation that did not exist there.” Remember the prime Sufi question is: ‘Why the separation between Man and God’ that we discussed in ‘Quest’ and ‘The Quest Continues’ in this newspaper. “Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet… or a butterfly’s wing.” Remember again, like the drop falling into the river and becoming the river yet retaining its individuality, simultaneous annihilation and consummation – ‘fana’.
A young and beautiful woman accompanied Dr Alexander for most of his journey. “High cheekbones and deep blue eyes. Golden tresses framed her lovely face.” Muslims will say that she was a ‘hoor’. I believe for eastern people she would have had deep black eyes and black tresses. The idea is to make you comfortable in your cultural idiom. Anyway, Alexander and the woman travelled on a beautiful wing of a butterfly. “Millions of butterflies were all around us… it was a river of life and colour, moving through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a peasant’s, but its colours – powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach – had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.”
he woman spoke to Alexander without using words. “The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true, he reports.” The message was in three parts: a) “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever”; b) “You have nothing to fear”; c) “There is nothing you can do wrong.”
He felt like he was being given the rules of a game he’d played all his life without ever fully understanding it. The woman continued wordlessly: “We will show you many things here but eventually you will go back.”
“Back where? Where is this place? Who am I? Why am I here?” These questions were asked silently and the answer came to Alexander’s mind “instantly in an explosion of light, colour, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate – hotter than fire and wetter than water – and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.”
As Alexander moved forward he found himself entering an “immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me… There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness. That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.” Darkness with light is why I call this article ‘luminosity’. Alexander feels that the orb was an ‘interpreter’ between him and “this vast presence surrounding me… It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was a giant cosmic womb.” He felt the orb was somehow connected to the woman and was guiding him.
Continues Dr Alexander: “I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone – even a doctor – told me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.”
Dr Eben Alexander’s explanation we will see next week and also read in his book ‘Proof of Heaven’ published by Simon & Schuster.
The writer is a political analyst. He can be contacted at [email protected]
