EBEN ALEXANDER III, MD
HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL NEUROSURGERY PROFESSOR (RETIRED), AUTHOR, AND SPEAKER
Dr. Eben Alexander was adopted into a scientific family, headed by a father who was a globally renowned neurosurgeon, who, in spite of being very scientifically minded, also had a profound belief in God and the power of prayer. Eben III was fully trained in conventional, materialist neuroscience to become a neurosurgeon, and spent over 15 years teaching neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. He presented over 200 lectures at conferences and events around the world on his neurosurgical interests (https://ebenalexander.com/about/curriculum-vitae/), as well as publishing over 160 peer-reviewed papers and invited chapters, and several books: (https://ebenalexander.com/about/publications/).
His worldview of conventional physicalism (or materialism, i.e. the idea that “brain creates consciousness”) was greatly challenged due to his own near-death experience during a weeklong coma while suffering from severe bacterial meningitis that affected all lobes of his brain. No dream or hallucination could have occurred in such a damaged brain, much less the extraordinary experience he witnessed. His medical claims of the severity of his case, and unexpected level of recovery, were supported by an independent case report on his medical records by three physicians not involved in his care, but fascinated by his apparently miraculous recovery:
His first book about the experience, Proof of Heaven (2012), resonated with a large segment of the world’s population as a reminder of their own existence beyond the limits of the physical world. It was on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for almost two years, including 42 weeks at the number one position, and has been published in over 40 languages. His second book, The Map of Heaven (2014), contains myriad reports of others having similar experiences who reached out to Dr. Alexander after reading Proof of Heaven. The true proof of heaven comes in his third book, co-written with his wife, Karen Newell, Living in a Mindful Universe (2017), that unites science and spirituality to make a strong scientific case for the survival of conscious awareness after physical bodily death, i.e. offering a vision of eternal souls and a grander existence than just our physical bodies. They draw on observations from quantum physics, neuroscience (the hard problem of consciousness), philosophy of mind (the binding problem), and parapsychology (non-local consciousness, such as telepathy and remote viewing, near-death and shared death experiences, after death communications, past life memories in children suggestive of reincarnation, etc.). Living in a Mindful Universe has received global scientific acclaim from many thought leaders in the field of consciousness studies:
Way Too Real To Be Real
EBEN ALEXANDER III, MD
My notions of the fundamental reality and nature of God were greatly strengthened after I had a profound near-death experience during a weeklong coma due to meningitis, yet in so many ways it merely strengthened a concept of God that I had had in my younger life. During the deepest part of my coma, in what I came to call “The Core,” a realm of resolution of all dualities into oneness, I came to see that my very conscious awareness was directly sourced in that God-force, such that any notion of separation was imaginary. This is true for all sentient beings. Thus, it is comforting to realize that over 90% of humans who have had such near-death experiences, many of whom might have previously been atheists or agnostics, come back to this world not only believing or having faith, but knowingthe reality of such a God-force at the core of the universe.
I had been adopted at the age of four months, and lived much of my life with subconscious doubt as to my rights to exist, if my own birth mother had left me behind. My near-death experience involved a forgetting of my life, a dense amnesia that allowed for an especially deep dive, ultimately to give me the evidence that the experience seemed “way too real to be real” because it really happened, just not in this physical world, but in a much more fundamental ideal realm.
This is why such experiences are often described as “timeless,” and allow us to witness many connections of events in our lives that might have seemed pointless as we lived them, but that when viewed from such an eternal perspective, all the events are there and interconnected for a reason. Such “life reviews” are often from the perspective of numerous participants, thus teaching us the golden rule, to treat others as we would like to be treated, as a moral code written into the very fabric of the universe (given that life reviews occur in about half of all near-death experiences).
I couldn’t have an “Eben Alexander life review”, because of my amnesia (a rarity in the near-death experience literature). But I saw generic life reviews and reincarnation in several fantastic visions that occurred in the Core, and those visions greatly clarified how we are here, co-creating our emerging reality with that God-force that so many experiencers have witnessed in their own near-misses with death.
The greatest gift of my amnesia was the ultimate recognition of the identity of my spiritual guide, a beautiful young woman on a butterfly wing in the Gateway Valley of my experience. In the months after awakening from coma, her identity was a deep mystery, until a picture of a deceased birth sister I had never known arrived in the mail four months after my coma. That recognition was the final step in accepting the love and light of my journey as identical with that God-force that was so totally reassuring during my coma experience!