A Neuroscientist Describes His Near-Death Visit To Another Realm

Interesting article. I am not so quick to call what he experienced as "heaven".
Funny you have to get a scientist to nearly die to understand what some quality time with hallucinogens has shown so many.

Proof of an afterlife, or simply that we really have no idea how the mind works? Via the Daily Beast, Dr. Eben Alexander recounts his trip to a higher plane of existence whilst his brain was shut down in a coma:

As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.
In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.
All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.
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.
Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them. Higher forms.
It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again.
Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.
The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”
“You have nothing to fear.”
“There is nothing you can do wrong.”
​

The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.
I continued moving forward and found myself 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. The orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this vast presence surrounding me. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb.
I’ve spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.
​

 

I find this quite interesting...and would like to read anything else he wrote about his.

I've read a book written by a man that technically died after being stuck by lightening through a telephone. (Can't remember if it was Touched by the Light or Embraced by the Light.) It was about where he "visited", and the long, arduous recovery process he went through afterwards. He remembered going "to heaven" and was basically compelled to share what he "learned". I remember one thing (or a couple) was that as long as you weren't breaking up families, who you slept with (such as being gay or not married) was No Big Deal! And the judging of who drinks and/or who smokes is NOT DONE after this life...it is us humans that are the most concerned about all of that. Where our hearts are, and actions with integrity are what matters/counts...if I recall accurately.

 

Because he was a Neuroscientist this makes it more valid somehow?

The he better than most, able to determine in such a situation that his brain under stress randomly firing neurons to create freaky images is proof of and afterlife.

Or he just as everyone else once shocked into facing their own mortality turns around and convinces himself, gee I better start believing in this shit just in case

 

seems to me this whole thing is meaningless unless he regained consciousness the instant his neocortex reactivated. otherwise, he gives no evidence that he had his dream during that particular part of the coma.

 

I would love it if this man would now smoke DMT and offer his comparison of the two experiences.

 

it only makes it more interesting because of what has become conventionality in the neuro-sciences over the past several decades. not any more or less valid. just more of a curiosity factor.

and i am curious as to what he did see, because i didn't really see much of anything in mine. nothing completely conclusive either way at any rate.

and now that i read the rest of the op, i see vanilla's point, sounds (mostly) like just another religious propaganda bit. but i don't think anything has to be they way any belief pretends to know about it for there to be that sense of being hugged. i have felt that kind of unseen affection. and nothing in my experience of it, associates it with, the claims of any particular belief.

er, but it wasn't uniquely nor specifically in connection with my flat-lining specifically that i've experienced it though.

 

I love hearing about near death experiences, so this is pretty darn interesting..

 

All of the experiences I've had which had convinced me that I was dying through psychedelics were nothing, at all, like any of the near death reports I've ever read. In a world were violence and love both occur, what would make us think that, if there is an after-life of some sort, it should be so very different? With both DMT and psilocybin I've experienced it many times, several times I had thoroughly convinced myself that I had actually died, and what it looked like, what it felt like, was so ineffable and unrelated to anything we could point to in our waking consciousness that it is essentially pointless to even discuss it. All that I can say is that it is very fast, very painful, blissful and horrifying simultaneously, alien and familiar, gorgeous and terribly hideous. It is all paradoxical and the visions I've had of "God" were also as such. I often wonder at even the supposed 'breakthrough' DMT experiences I read about, because when people talk about being communicated with by begins, operated on, or taken through cities or landscapes etc; that is what I experience when I don't take enough, somewhere in between the fun-zone and the soul exiting the body zone, a sort of curious but gentle trip with beings and definitely recognizable forms and patterns. When I have what at least I consider a break through experience, that shit is so profoundly and utterly bizarre that form and patterns cease to exist, it is actually almost without vision, it is more of a state of non-being, or absorption into some'thing' very much other, non-local and without and boundary. It also hurts like absolute hell on the come up and does not leave me with any impression that this experience is beneficial or damaging, it seems to be somehow both.

 

Oddly one out of every hundred NDE’s do not like to talk about their experience and in some cases suddenly became religious. A scientist was curious so he pressed the matter and several confessed that they had seen what they believed to be hell. :devil:


Hotwater

 

Another opinion:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/10/09/newsweek-panders-to-the-deluded-again/

 

I am more inclined to think his dream state produced what his unconscious minds concept of an afterlife should or could be. Just because he is a scientist does not mean he has not developed a sub conscious idea of an afterlife or what it would be like.